# Boosting Fair Classifier Generalization through Adaptive Priority Reweighing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08375 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08375/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Certifying and removing disparate impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3756/) (2014)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [Fair prediction with disparate impact: A study of bias in recidivism prediction instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07524/) (2016)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [Null It Out: Guarding Protected Attributes by Iterative Nullspace Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07667/) (2020)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [On Fairness and Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02012/) (2017)
- [Learning Adversarially Fair and Transferable Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06309/) (2018)
- [AI Fairness 360: An Extensible Toolkit for Detecting, Understanding, and Mitigating Unwanted Algorithmic Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01943/) (2018)
- [Empirical Risk Minimization under Fairness Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08626/) (2018)
- [Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08868/) (2016)
- [FairGAN: Fairness-aware Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11202/) (2018)
- [Deep Stable Learning for Out-Of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07876/) (2021)
- [A Convex Framework for Fair Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02409/) (2017)
- [Identifying and Correcting Label Bias in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04966/) (2019)
- [Algorithmic Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09784/) (2020)
- [Fairness in Recommendation Ranking through Pairwise Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00780/) (2019)
- [Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00524/) (2017)
- [Fair Mixup: Fairness via Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06503/) (2021)
- [FairBatch: Batch Selection for Model Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01696/) (2020)
- [Learning Optimal and Fair Decision Trees for Non-Discriminative Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10598/) (2019)
- [A Confidence-Based Approach for Balancing Fairness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.05764/) (2016)
- [FR-Train: A Mutual Information-Based Approach to Fair and Robust Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10234/) (2020)
- [Sample Selection for Fair and Robust Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14222/) (2021)
- [Model Agnostic Sample Reweighting for Out-of-Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09819/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning for Debiased Candidate Generation in Large-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12964/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Projected Boosting with Fairness Constraints: Quantifying the Cost of Fair Training Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05713/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the increasing penetration of machine learning applications in critical decision-making areas, calls for algorithmic fairness are more prominent. Although there have been various modalities to improve algorithmic fairness through learning with fairness constraints, their performance does not generalize well in the test set. A performance-promising fair algorithm with better generalizability is needed. This paper proposes a novel adaptive reweighing method to eliminate the impact of the distribution shifts between training and test data on model generalizability. Most previous reweighing methods propose to assign a unified weight for each (sub)group. Rather, our method granularly models the distance from the sample predictions to the decision boundary. Our adaptive reweighing method prioritizes samples closer to the decision boundary and assigns a higher weight to improve the generalizability of fair classifiers. Extensive experiments are performed to validate the generalizability of our adaptive priority reweighing method for accuracy and fairness measures (i.e., equal opportunity, equalized odds, and demographic parity) in tabular benchmarks. We also highlight the performance of our method in improving the fairness of language and vision models. The code is available at https://github.com/che2198/APW.