Developing classification methods with high accuracy that also avoid unfair treatment of different groups has become increasingly important for data-driven decision making in social applications. Many existing methods enforce fairness constraints on a selected classifier (e.g., logistic regression) by directly forming constrained optimizations. We instead re-derive a new classifier from the first principles of distributional robustness that incorporates fairness criteria into a worst-case logarithmic loss minimization. This construction takes the form of a minimax game and produces a parametric exponential family conditional distribution that resembles truncated logistic regression. We present the theoretical benefits of our approach in terms of its convexity and asymptotic convergence. We then demonstrate the practical advantages of our approach on three benchmark fairness datasets.

Making predictions that are fair with regard to protected attributes (race, gender, age, etc.) has become an important requirement for classification algorithms. Existing techniques derive a fair model from sampled labeled data relying on the assumption that training and testing data are identically and independently drawn (iid) from the same distribution. In practice, distribution shift can and does occur between training and testing datasets as the characteristics of individuals interacting with the machine learning system change. We investigate fairness under covariate shift, a relaxation of the iid assumption in which the inputs or covariates change while the conditional label distribution remains the same. We seek fair decisions under these assumptions on target data with unknown labels. We propose an approach that obtains the predictor that is robust to the worst-case testing performance while satisfying target fairness requirements and matching statistical properties of the source data. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on benchmark prediction tasks.

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the widely spoken languages in the world, and yet there are few NLU datasets available for this language. The availability of high-quality evaluation datasets is a necessity for reliable assessment of the progress on different NLU tasks and domains. We introduce ParsiNLU, the first benchmark in Persian language that includes a range of language understanding tasks—reading comprehension, textual entailment, and so on. These datasets are collected in a multitude of ways, often involving manual annotations by native speakers. This results in over 14.5k new instances across 6 distinct NLU tasks. Additionally, we present the first results on state-of-the-art monolingual and multilingual pre-trained language models on this benchmark and compare them with human performance, which provides valuable insights into our ability to tackle natural language understanding challenges in Persian. We hope ParsiNLU fosters further research and advances in Persian language understanding.1

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Making predictions that are fair with regard to protected group membership (race, gender, age, etc.) has become an important requirement for classification algorithms. Existing techniques derive a fair model from sampled labeled data relying on the assumption that training and testing data are identically and independently drawn (iid) from the same distribution.In practice, distribution shift can and does occur between training and testing datasets as the characteristics of individuals interacting with the machine learning system-and which individuals interact with the system-change. We investigate fairness under covariate shift, a relaxation of the iid assumption in which the inputs or covariates change while the conditional label distribution remains the same. We seek fair decisions under these assumptions on target data with unknown labels. We propose an approach that obtains the predictor that is robust to the worst-case in terms of target performance while satisfying target fairness requirements and matching statistical properties of the source data. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on benchmark prediction tasks.