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Blind Justice: Fairness with Encrypted Sensitive Attributes (arxiv.org)
1 point by n__k on Jun 12, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: By scrambling each person's gender or race and letting several computers run the fairness math together without seeing the values, a fair model can be trained or checked. The usual approach must inspect those attributes; this keeps them hidden while still catching unfair outcomes.

Abstract

Recent work has explored how to train machine learning models which do not discriminate against any subgroup of the population as determined by sensitive attributes such as gender or race. To avoid disparate treatment, sensitive attributes should not be considered. On the other hand, in order to avoid disparate impact, sensitive attributes must be examined, e.g., in order to learn a fair model, or to check if a given model is fair. We introduce methods from secure multi-party computation which allow us to avoid both. By encrypting sensitive attributes, we show how an outcome-based fair model may be learned, checked, or have its outputs verified and held to account, without users revealing their sensitive attributes.

Niki Kilbertus, Adrià Gascón, Matt J. Kusner, Michael Veale, Krishna P. Gummadi, Adrian Weller
arXiv:1806.03281 · stat.ML, cs.CR, cs.CY, cs.LG · submitted Jun 8, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · published at ICML 2018

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