fairret: a Framework for Differentiable Fairness Regularization Terms

Maarten Buyl, Marybeth Defrance, T. D. Bie
2/12/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: aida-ugent/fairret (32 stars, MIT, PyTorch, last commit 2024-07-23).

Abstract

Current fairness toolkits in machine learning only admit a limited range of fairness definitions and have seen little integration with automatic differentiation libraries, despite the central role these libraries play in modern machine learning pipelines. We introduce a framework of fairness regularization terms (fairrets) which quantify bias as modular, flexible objectives that are easily integrated in automatic differentiation pipelines. By employing a general definition of fairness in terms of linear-fractional statistics, a wide class of fairrets can be computed efficiently. Experiments show the behavior of their gradients and their utility in enforcing fairness with minimal loss of predictive power compared to baselines. Our contribution includes a PyTorch implementation of the fairret framework.

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Code Implementations(1)

aida-ugent/fairretCommunity100%
PyTorchMIT

A fairness library in PyTorch.

321PythonJan 31, 20242 years agoMIT
aiartificial-intelligencebiasdeep-learningfairness+5 more

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Cite this paper

@article{buyl2026fairret,
  title  = {fairret: a Framework for Differentiable Fairness Regularization Terms},
  author = {Maarten Buyl and Marybeth Defrance and T. D. Bie},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2310.17256},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17256},
  journal = {ICLR 2023 2023}
}

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