论文标题
管道中的个人公平性
Individual Fairness in Pipelines
论文作者
论文摘要
众所周知,由单独的公平组件构建的系统本身可能不公平。在这项工作中,我们研究了管道组成下的个人公平性。管道与普通的顺序或重复组成不同,因为个体可能会在任何阶段退出,而在后续阶段的分类可能取决于个人的剩余“队列”。例如,一家公司可能会聘请一个新项目的团队,然后在后来促进球队表现最高的人。与其他重复的分类设置不同,不公平的程度在多个公平的步骤中优雅地降低了,即使在只有两个阶段的管道中,管道的不公平程度也可能是任意的。 在众多现实世界的示例中,我们提供了一个严格的框架,用于评估管道的不同类型的公平保证。我们表明,幼稚的审计无法揭示系统的不公平性,为了确保公平性,在管道中不同阶段的算法设计之间必须存在某种形式的依赖性。最后,我们提供的结构可以允许在以后的阶段灵活性,这意味着在构建早期阶段时无需锁定整个管道。
It is well understood that a system built from individually fair components may not itself be individually fair. In this work, we investigate individual fairness under pipeline composition. Pipelines differ from ordinary sequential or repeated composition in that individuals may drop out at any stage, and classification in subsequent stages may depend on the remaining "cohort" of individuals. As an example, a company might hire a team for a new project and at a later point promote the highest performer on the team. Unlike other repeated classification settings, where the degree of unfairness degrades gracefully over multiple fair steps, the degree of unfairness in pipelines can be arbitrary, even in a pipeline with just two stages. Guided by a panoply of real-world examples, we provide a rigorous framework for evaluating different types of fairness guarantees for pipelines. We show that naïve auditing is unable to uncover systematic unfairness and that, in order to ensure fairness, some form of dependence must exist between the design of algorithms at different stages in the pipeline. Finally, we provide constructions that permit flexibility at later stages, meaning that there is no need to lock in the entire pipeline at the time that the early stage is constructed.