# User-oriented Fairness in Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.10671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10671/

## Key facts

- Cited by 75 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [A Reductions Approach to Fair Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02453/) (2018)
- [Fairness Beyond Disparate Treatment & Disparate Impact: Learning Classification without Disparate Mistreatment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08452/) (2016)
- [Fairness of Exposure in Rankings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07281/) (2018)
- [Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06902/) (2019)
- [Fairness in Recommendation Ranking through Pairwise Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00780/) (2019)
- [Equity of Attention: Amortizing Individual Fairness in Rankings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01788/) (2018)
- [Beyond Parity: Fairness Objectives for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08804/) (2017)
- [Managing Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems with Personalized Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07555/) (2019)
- [Ranking with Fairness Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06840/) (2017)
- [FairRec: Two-Sided Fairness for Personalized Recommendations in Two-Sided Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10764/) (2020)
- [Towards Long-term Fairness in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03584/) (2021)
- [Policy Learning for Fairness in Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04056/) (2019)
- [Fairness-Aware Explainable Recommendation over Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02046/) (2020)
- [Multisided Fairness for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00093/) (2017)
- [The Unfairness of Popularity Bias in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13286/) (2019)
- [Satisfying Real-world Goals with Dataset Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07558/) (2016)
- [Pairwise Fairness for Ranking and Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05330/) (2019)
- [Two-Player Games for Efficient Non-Convex Constrained Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06500/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Alternative Experimental Settings for Evaluating Top-N Item Recommendation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04484/) (2020)
- [FairSearch: A Tool For Fairness in Ranked Search Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13134/) (2019)
- [User Fairness in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06349/) (2018)
- [Multi-stakeholder Recommendation and its Connection to Multi-sided Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13158/) (2019)
- [Graph Clustering Bandits for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.00596/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07609/) (2023)
- [Fairness in Graph Mining: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09888/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05055/) (2023)
- [Edge-Cloud Polarization and Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey for AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06061/) (2021)
- [Personalized Counterfactual Fairness in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09829/) (2021)
- [UP5: Unbiased Foundation Model for Fairness-aware Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12090/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10117/) (2022)
- [Fairness in Recommender Systems: Research Landscape and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11127/) (2022)
- [CPFair: Personalized Consumer and Producer Fairness Re-ranking for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08085/) (2022)
- [Understanding Biases in ChatGPT-based Recommender Systems: Provider Fairness, Temporal Stability, and Recency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10545/) (2024)
- [Fairness in Recommendation: Foundations, Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13619/) (2022)
- [Ensuring User-side Fairness in Dynamic Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15651/) (2023)
- [FairVFL: A Fair Vertical Federated Learning Framework with Contrastive Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03200/) (2022)
- [iAgent: LLM Agent as a Shield between User and Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14662/) (2025)
- [Comprehensive Fair Meta-learned Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04789/) (2022)
- [Improving Recommendation Fairness via Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06333/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Fairness-aware Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00403/) (2023)
- [Experiments on Generalizability of User-Oriented Fairness in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08289/) (2022)
- [A Topological Perspective on Demystifying GNN-Based Link Prediction Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04612/) (2023)
- [Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18454/) (2024)
- [RGRecSys: A Toolkit for Robustness Evaluation of Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04399/) (2022)
- [The Unfairness of Active Users and Popularity Bias in Point-of-Interest Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13307/) (2022)
- [Dissecting Submission Limit in Desk-Rejections: A Mathematical Analysis of Fairness in AI Conference Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00690/) (2025)
- [Learning Informative Representation for Fairness-aware Multivariate Time-series Forecasting: A Group-based Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11535/) (2023)
- [Intersectional Two-sided Fairness in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02816/) (2024)
- [FairDgcl: Fairness-aware Recommendation with Dynamic Graph Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17555/) (2024)
- [CURE4Rec: A Benchmark for Recommendation Unlearning with Deeper Influence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14393/) (2024)
- [Towards Trustworthy AI-Empowered Real-Time Bidding for Online Advertisement Auctioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07770/) (2022)
- [When Newer is Not Better: Does Deep Learning Really Benefit Recommendation From Implicit Feedback?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01801/) (2023)
- [A Normative Framework for Benchmarking Consumer Fairness in Large Language Model Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02219/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As a highly data-driven application, recommender systems could be affected by data bias, resulting in unfair results for different data groups, which could be a reason that affects the system performance. Therefore, it is important to identify and solve the unfairness issues in recommendation scenarios. In this paper, we address the unfairness problem in recommender systems from the user perspective. We group users into advantaged and disadvantaged groups according to their level of activity, and conduct experiments to show that current recommender systems will behave unfairly between two groups of users. Specifically, the advantaged users (active) who only account for a small proportion in data enjoy much higher recommendation quality than those disadvantaged users (inactive). Such bias can also affect the overall performance since the disadvantaged users are the majority. To solve this problem, we provide a re-ranking approach to mitigate this unfairness problem by adding constraints over evaluation metrics. The experiments we conducted on several real-world datasets with various recommendation algorithms show that our approach can not only improve group fairness of users in recommender systems, but also achieve better overall recommendation performance.