# Consistent End-to-End Estimation for Counterfactual Fairness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2023.

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

- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Counterfactual Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06856/) (2017)
- [Certifying and removing disparate impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3756/) (2014)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA: A Unifying Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04809/) (2019)
- [Causal Effect Inference with Deep Latent-Variable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08821/) (2017)
- [Learning Adversarially Fair and Transferable Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06309/) (2018)
- [Deep Structural Causal Models for Tractable Counterfactual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06485/) (2020)
- [Path-Specific Counterfactual Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08139/) (2018)
- [FairGAN: Fairness-aware Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11202/) (2018)
- [CausalGAN: Learning Causal Implicit Generative Models with Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02023/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Fairness in Text Classification through Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10610/) (2018)
- [Classification with Fairness Constraints: A Meta-Algorithm with Provable Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06055/) (2018)
- [Fair Inference On Outcomes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10378/) (2017)
- [DECAF: Generating Fair Synthetic Data Using Causally-Aware Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12884/) (2021)
- [Fairness Under Unawareness: Assessing Disparity When Protected Class Is Unobserved](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11154/) (2018)
- [Estimating the Effects of Continuous-valued Interventions using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12326/) (2020)
- [Achieving Fairness through Adversarial Learning: an Application to Recidivism Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00199/) (2018)
- [Neural Causal Models for Counterfactual Identification and Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00035/) (2022)
- [Survey on Causal-based Machine Learning Fairness Notions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09553/) (2020)
- [Discrimination in the Age of Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03731/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual Fairness with Disentangled Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11878/) (2020)
- [Causal Fairness Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11385/) (2022)
- [Counterfactual Identifiability of Bijective Causal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02228/) (2023)
- [Fairness Through Causal Awareness: Learning Latent-Variable Models for Biased Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02519/) (2018)
- [TabFairGAN: Fair Tabular Data Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00666/) (2021)
- [Indeterminacy in Generative Models: Characterization and Strong Identifiability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00801/) (2022)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Fair Clinical Risk Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06260/) (2019)
- [On Multi-Cause Causal Inference with Unobserved Confounding: Counterexamples, Impossibility, and Alternatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10286/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Causal Fairness under Unobserved Confounding: A Neural Sensitivity Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18460/) (2023)
- [Counterfactual Fairness by Combining Factual and Counterfactual Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01977/) (2024)
- [Differentially Private Learners for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03486/) (2025)
- [COPF: An Online Framework for Deployment-Stable Counterfactual Fairness in Evolving Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00700/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fairness in predictions is of direct importance in practice due to legal, ethical, and societal reasons. This is often accomplished through counterfactual fairness, which ensures that the prediction for an individual is the same as that in a counterfactual world under a different sensitive attribute. However, achieving counterfactual fairness is challenging as counterfactuals are unobservable, and, because of that, existing baselines for counterfactual fairness do not have theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose a novel counterfactual fairness predictor for making predictions under counterfactual fairness. Here, we follow the standard counterfactual fairness setting and directly learn the counterfactual distribution of the descendants of the sensitive attribute via tailored neural networks, which we then use to enforce fair predictions through a novel counterfactual mediator regularization. Unique to our work is that we provide theoretical guarantees that our method is effective in ensuring the notion of counterfactual fairness. We further compare the performance across various datasets, where our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.