Closing the Gap in the Trade-off between Fair Representations and Accuracy

Abstract

The rapid developments of various machine learning models and their deployments in several applications has led to discussions around the importance of looking beyond the accuracies of these models. Fairness of such models is one such aspect that is deservedly gaining more attention. In this work, we analyse the natural language representations of documents and sentences (i.e., encodings) for any embedding-level bias that could potentially also affect the fairness of the downstream tasks that rely on them. We identify bias in these encodings either towards or against different sub-groups based on the difference in their reconstruction errors along various subsets of principal components. We explore and recommend ways to mitigate such bias in the encodings while also maintaining a decent accuracy in classification models that use them.