RULER: discriminative and iterative adversarial training for deep neural network fairness

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are becoming an integral part of many real-world applications, such as autonomous driving and financial management. While these models enable autonomy, there are however concerns regarding their ethics in decision making. For instance, fairness is an aspect that requires particular attention. A number of fairness testing techniques have been proposed to address this issue, e.g., by generating test cases called individual discriminatory instances for repairing DNNs. Although they have demonstrated great potential, they tend to generate many test cases that are not directly effective in improving fairness and incur substantial computation overhead. We propose a new model repair technique, Ruler, by discriminating sensitive and non-sensitive attributes during test case generation for model repair. The generated cases are then used in training to improve DNN fairness. Ruler balances the trade-off between accuracy and fairness by decomposing the training procedure into two phases and introducing a novel iterative adversarial training method for fairness. Compared to the state-of-the-art techniques on four datasets, Ruler has 7-28 times more effective repair test cases generated, is 10-15 times faster in test generation, and has 26-43% more fairness improvement on average.

• Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging; • Computing methodologies → Neural networks.