NeuFair: Neural Network Fairness Repair with Dropout

This paper investigates neuron dropout as a post-processing bias mitigation method for deep neural networks (DNNs). Neural-driven software solutions are increasingly applied in socially critical domains with significant fairness implications. While DNNs are exceptional at learning statistical patterns from data, they may encode and amplify historical biases. Existing bias mitigation algorithms often require modifying the input dataset or the learning algorithms. We posit that prevalent dropout methods may be an effective and less intrusive approach to improve fairness of pre-trained DNNs during inference. However, finding the ideal set of neurons to drop is a combinatorial problem. We propose NeuFair, a family of post-processing randomized algorithms that mitigate unfairness in pre-trained DNNs via dropouts during inference. Our randomized search is guided by an objective to minimize discrimination while maintaining the model's utility. We show that NeuFair is efficient and effective in improving fairness (up to 69%) with minimal or no model performance degradation. We provide intuitive explanations of these phenomena and carefully examine the influence of various hyperparameters of NeuFair on the results. Finally, we empirically and conceptually compare NeuFair to different state-of-the-art bias mitigators. CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering → Search-based software engineering; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning.