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Documents authored by Ilvento, Christina

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.2
Metric Learning for Individual Fairness

Authors: Christina Ilvento

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 156, 1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020)

Abstract
There has been much discussion concerning how "fairness" should be measured or enforced in classification. Individual Fairness [Dwork et al., 2012], which requires that similar individuals be treated similarly, is a highly appealing definition as it gives strong treatment guarantees for individuals. Unfortunately, the need for a task-specific similarity metric has prevented its use in practice. In this work, we propose a solution to the problem of approximating a metric for Individual Fairness based on human judgments. Our model assumes access to a human fairness arbiter who is free of explicit biases and possesses sufficient domain knowledge to evaluate similarity. Our contributions include definitions for metric approximation relevant for Individual Fairness, constructions for approximations from a limited number of realistic queries to the arbiter on a sample of individuals, and learning procedures to construct hypotheses for metric approximations which generalize to unseen samples under certain assumptions of learnability of distance threshold functions.
Cite as

Christina Ilvento. Metric Learning for Individual Fairness. In 1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 156, pp. 2:1-2:11, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{ilvento:LIPIcs.FORC.2020.2,
  author =	{Ilvento, Christina},
  title =	{{Metric Learning for Individual Fairness}},
  booktitle =	{1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020)},
  pages =	{2:1--2:11},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-142-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{156},
  editor =	{Roth, Aaron},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-120183},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: metric learning, individual fairness, fair machine learning}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.7
Individual Fairness in Pipelines

Authors: Cynthia Dwork, Christina Ilvento, and Meena Jagadeesan

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 156, 1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020)

Abstract
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.
Cite as

Cynthia Dwork, Christina Ilvento, and Meena Jagadeesan. Individual Fairness in Pipelines. In 1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 156, pp. 7:1-7:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{dwork_et_al:LIPIcs.FORC.2020.7,
  author =	{Dwork, Cynthia and Ilvento, Christina and Jagadeesan, Meena},
  title =	{{Individual Fairness in Pipelines}},
  booktitle =	{1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:22},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-142-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{156},
  editor =	{Roth, Aaron},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.7},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-120235},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: algorithmic fairness, fairness under composition, pipelines}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.8
Abstracting Fairness: Oracles, Metrics, and Interpretability

Authors: Cynthia Dwork, Christina Ilvento, Guy N. Rothblum, and Pragya Sur

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 156, 1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020)

Abstract
It is well understood that classification algorithms, for example, for deciding on loan applications, cannot be evaluated for fairness without taking context into account. We examine what can be learned from a fairness oracle equipped with an underlying understanding of "true" fairness. The oracle takes as input a (context, classifier) pair satisfying an arbitrary fairness definition, and accepts or rejects the pair according to whether the classifier satisfies the underlying fairness truth. Our principal conceptual result is an extraction procedure that learns the underlying truth; moreover, the procedure can learn an approximation to this truth given access to a weak form of the oracle. Since every "truly fair" classifier induces a coarse metric, in which those receiving the same decision are at distance zero from one another and those receiving different decisions are at distance one, this extraction process provides the basis for ensuring a rough form of metric fairness, also known as individual fairness. Our principal technical result is a higher fidelity extractor under a mild technical constraint on the weak oracle’s conception of fairness. Our framework permits the scenario in which many classifiers, with differing outcomes, may all be considered fair. Our results have implications for interpretablity - a highly desired but poorly defined property of classification systems that endeavors to permit a human arbiter to reject classifiers deemed to be "unfair" or illegitimately derived.
Cite as

Cynthia Dwork, Christina Ilvento, Guy N. Rothblum, and Pragya Sur. Abstracting Fairness: Oracles, Metrics, and Interpretability. In 1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 156, pp. 8:1-8:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{dwork_et_al:LIPIcs.FORC.2020.8,
  author =	{Dwork, Cynthia and Ilvento, Christina and Rothblum, Guy N. and Sur, Pragya},
  title =	{{Abstracting Fairness: Oracles, Metrics, and Interpretability}},
  booktitle =	{1st Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2020)},
  pages =	{8:1--8:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-142-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{156},
  editor =	{Roth, Aaron},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.8},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-120247},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2020.8},
  annote =	{Keywords: Algorithmic fairness, fairness definitions, causality-based fairness, interpretability, individual fairness, metric fairness}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.33
Fairness Under Composition

Authors: Cynthia Dwork and Christina Ilvento

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 124, 10th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2019)

Abstract
Algorithmic fairness, and in particular the fairness of scoring and classification algorithms, has become a topic of increasing social concern and has recently witnessed an explosion of research in theoretical computer science, machine learning, statistics, the social sciences, and law. Much of the literature considers the case of a single classifier (or scoring function) used once, in isolation. In this work, we initiate the study of the fairness properties of systems composed of algorithms that are fair in isolation; that is, we study fairness under composition. We identify pitfalls of naïve composition and give general constructions for fair composition, demonstrating both that classifiers that are fair in isolation do not necessarily compose into fair systems and also that seemingly unfair components may be carefully combined to construct fair systems. We focus primarily on the individual fairness setting proposed in [Dwork, Hardt, Pitassi, Reingold, Zemel, 2011], but also extend our results to a large class of group fairness definitions popular in the recent literature, exhibiting several cases in which group fairness definitions give misleading signals under composition.
Cite as

Cynthia Dwork and Christina Ilvento. Fairness Under Composition. In 10th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 124, pp. 33:1-33:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019)

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@InProceedings{dwork_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.33,
  author =	{Dwork, Cynthia and Ilvento, Christina},
  title =	{{Fairness Under Composition}},
  booktitle =	{10th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2019)},
  pages =	{33:1--33:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-095-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{124},
  editor =	{Blum, Avrim},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.33},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-101269},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.33},
  annote =	{Keywords: algorithmic fairness, fairness, fairness under composition}
}
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