论文标题
通过减轻敏感属性泄漏来提高图神经网络中的公平性
Improving Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Mitigating Sensitive Attribute Leakage
论文作者
论文摘要
图神经网络(GNN)在图形上学习节点表示方面表现出很大的力量。但是,它们可能会从训练数据中继承历史偏见,从而导致预测的歧视性偏见。尽管某些工作已经开发出公平的GNN,但其中大多数直接从非图形域借用了公平表示学习技术,而没有考虑GNN中特征传播引起的敏感属性泄漏的潜在问题。但是,我们从经验上观察到,特征传播可能会改变以前无害特征与敏感特征的相关性。这可以看作是敏感信息的泄漏,可以进一步加剧预测中的歧视。因此,我们根据特征相关性设计了两个特征掩盖策略,以突出考虑特征传播和相关性变化在减轻歧视时的重要性。在我们的分析中,我们提出了公平的视图图神经网络(FAIRVGNN),以通过自动识别和掩盖敏感的相关特征来生成特征的公平视图,以考虑特征传播后的相关变化。鉴于博学的公平视图,我们会适应编码器的夹紧权重,以避免使用敏感相关的功能。现实世界中数据集的实验表明,Fairvgnn在模型效用和公平性之间取得了更好的权衡。我们的代码可在https://github.com/yuwvandy/fairvgnn上公开获取。
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great power in learning node representations on graphs. However, they may inherit historical prejudices from training data, leading to discriminatory bias in predictions. Although some work has developed fair GNNs, most of them directly borrow fair representation learning techniques from non-graph domains without considering the potential problem of sensitive attribute leakage caused by feature propagation in GNNs. However, we empirically observe that feature propagation could vary the correlation of previously innocuous non-sensitive features to the sensitive ones. This can be viewed as a leakage of sensitive information which could further exacerbate discrimination in predictions. Thus, we design two feature masking strategies according to feature correlations to highlight the importance of considering feature propagation and correlation variation in alleviating discrimination. Motivated by our analysis, we propose Fair View Graph Neural Network (FairVGNN) to generate fair views of features by automatically identifying and masking sensitive-correlated features considering correlation variation after feature propagation. Given the learned fair views, we adaptively clamp weights of the encoder to avoid using sensitive-related features. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that FairVGNN enjoys a better trade-off between model utility and fairness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuWVandy/FairVGNN.