Generalizing Fairness using Multi-Task Learning without Demographic Information
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To ensure the fairness of machine learning systems, we can include a fairness loss during training based on demographic information associated with the training data. However, we cannot train debiased classifiers for most tasks since the relevant datasets lack demographic annotations. Can we utilize demographic data for a related task to improve the fairness of our target task? We demonstrate that demographic fairness objectives transfer to new tasks trained within a multi-task framework. We adapt a single-task fairness loss to a multi-task setting to exploit demographic labels from a related task in debiasing a target task. We explore different settings with missing demographic data and show how our loss can improve fairness even without in-task demographics, across various domains and tasks.
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