Course selection is challenging for students in higher educational institutions. Existing course recommendation systems make relevant suggestions to the students and help them in exploring the available courses. The recommended courses can influence students' choice of degree program, future employment, and even their socioeconomic status. This paper focuses on identifying and alleviating biases that might be present in a course recommender system. We strive to promote balanced opportunities with our suggestions to all groups of students. At the same time, we need to make recommendations of good quality to all protected groups. We formulate our approach as a multi-objective optimization problem and study the trade-offs between equal opportunity and quality. We evaluate our methods using both real-world and synthetic datasets. The results indicate that we can considerably improve fairness regarding equality of opportunity, but we will introduce some quality loss. Out of the four methods we tested, GHC-Inc and GHC-Tabu are the best performing ones with different advantageous characteristics.
Recommendation, information retrieval, and other information access systems pose unique challenges for investigating and applying the fairness and non-discrimination concepts that have been developed for studying other machine learning systems. While fair information access shares many commonalities with fair classification, the multistakeholder nature of information access applications, the rank-based problem setting, the centrality of personalization in many cases, and the role of user response complicate the problem of identifying precisely what types and operationalizations of fairness may be relevant, let alone measuring or promoting them. In this monograph, we present a taxonomy of the various dimensions of fair information access and survey the literature to date on this new and rapidly-growing topic. We preface this with brief introductions to information access and algorithmic fairness, to facilitate use of this work by scholars with experience in one (or neither) of these fields who wish to learn about their intersection. We conclude with several open problems in fair information access, along with some suggestions for how to approach research in this space.
Educational technologies, and the systems of schooling in which they are deployed, enact particular ideologies about what is important to know and how learners should learn. As artificial intelligence technologies -- in education and beyond -- may contribute to inequitable outcomes for marginalized communities, various approaches have been developed to evaluate and mitigate the harmful impacts of AI. However, we argue in this paper that the dominant paradigm of evaluating fairness on the basis of performance disparities in AI models is inadequate for confronting the systemic inequities that educational AI systems (re)produce. We draw on a lens of structural injustice informed by critical theory and Black feminist scholarship to critically interrogate several widely-studied and widely-adopted categories of educational AI and explore how they are bound up in and reproduce historical legacies of structural injustice and inequity, regardless of the parity of their models' performance. We close with alternative visions for a more equitable future for educational AI.
Driven by the need to capture users' evolving interests and optimize their long-term experiences, more and more recommender systems have started to model recommendation as a Markov decision process and employ reinforcement learning to address the problem. Shouldn't research on the fairness of recommender systems follow the same trend from static evaluation and one-shot intervention to dynamic monitoring and non-stop control? In this paper, we portray the recent developments in recommender systems first and then discuss how fairness could be baked into the reinforcement learning techniques for recommendation. Moreover, we argue that in order to make further progress in recommendation fairness, we may want to consider multi-agent (game-theoretic) optimization, multi-objective (Pareto) optimization, and simulation-based optimization, in the general framework of stochastic games.
As recommendation is essentially a comparative (or ranking) process, a good explanation should illustrate to users why an item is believed to be better than another, i.e., comparative explanations about the recommended items. Ideally, after reading the explanations, a user should reach the same ranking of items as the system's. Unfortunately, little research attention has yet been paid on such comparative explanations. In this work, we develop an extract-and-refine architecture to explain the relative comparisons among a set of ranked items from a recommender system. For each recommended item, we first extract one sentence from its associated reviews that best suits the desired comparison against a set of reference items. Then this extracted sentence is further articulated with respect to the target user through a generative model to better explain why the item is recommended. We design a new explanation quality metric based on BLEU to guide the end-to-end training of the extraction and refinement components, which avoids generation of generic content. Extensive offline evaluations on two large recommendation benchmark datasets and serious user studies against an array of state-of-the-art explainable recommendation algorithms demonstrate the necessity of comparative explanations and the effectiveness of our solution.
Ranking is a fundamental operation in information access systems, to filter information and direct user attention towards items deemed most relevant to them. Due to position bias, items of similar relevance may receive significantly different exposure, raising fairness concerns for item providers and motivating recent research into fair ranking. While the area has progressed dramatically over recent years, no study to date has investigated the potential problem posed by duplicated items. Duplicates and near-duplicates are common in several domains, including marketplaces and document collections available to search engines. In this work, we study the behaviour of different fair ranking policies in the presence of duplicates, quantifying the extra-exposure gained by redundant items. We find that fairness-aware ranking policies may conflict with diversity, due to their potential to incentivize duplication more than policies solely focused on relevance. This fact poses a problem for system owners who, as a result of this incentive, may have to deal with increased redundancy, which is at odds with user satisfaction. Finally, we argue that this aspect represents a blind spot in the normative reasoning underlying common fair ranking metrics, as rewarding providers who duplicate their items with increased exposure seems unfair for the remaining providers.
Recently, lots of algorithms have been proposed for learning a fair classifier from centralized data. However, how to privately train a fair classifier on decentralized data has not been fully studied yet. In this work, we first propose a new theoretical framework, with which we analyze the value of federated learning in improving fairness. Our analysis reveals that federated learning can strictly boost model fairness compared with all non-federated algorithms. We then theoretically and empirically show that the performance tradeoff of FedAvg-based fair learning algorithms is strictly worse than that of a fair classifier trained on centralized data. To resolve this, we propose FedFB, a private fair learning algorithm on decentralized data with a modified FedAvg protocol. Our extensive experimental results show that FedFB significantly outperforms existing approaches, sometimes achieving a similar tradeoff as the one trained on centralized data.
Rankings, especially those in search and recommendation systems, often determine how people access information and how information is exposed to people. Therefore, how to balance the relevance and fairness of information exposure is considered as one of the key problems for modern IR systems. As conventional ranking frameworks that myopically sorts documents with their relevance will inevitably introduce unfair result exposure, recent studies on ranking fairness mostly focus on dynamic ranking paradigms where result rankings can be adapted in real-time to support fairness in groups (i.e., races, genders, etc.). Existing studies on fairness in dynamic learning to rank, however, often achieve the overall fairness of document exposure in ranked lists by significantly sacrificing the performance of result relevance and fairness on the top results. To address this problem, we propose a fair and unbiased ranking method named Maximal Marginal Fairness (MMF). The algorithm integrates unbiased estimators for both relevance and merit-based fairness while providing an explicit controller that balances the selection of documents to maximize the marginal relevance and fairness in top-k results. Theoretical and empirical analysis shows that, with small compromises on long list fairness, our method achieves superior efficiency and effectiveness comparing to the state-of-the-art algorithms in both relevance and fairness for top-k rankings.
We investigate the problem of fair recommendation in the context of two-sided online platforms, comprising customers on one side and producers on the other. Traditionally, recommendation services in these platforms have focused on maximizing customer satisfaction by tailoring the results according to the personalized preferences of individual customers. However, our investigation reveals that such customer-centric design may lead to unfair distribution of exposure among the producers, which may adversely impact their well-being. On the other hand, a producer-centric design might become unfair to the customers. Thus, we consider fairness issues that span both customers and producers. Our approach involves a novel mapping of the fair recommendation problem to a constrained version of the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods. Our proposed FairRec algorithm guarantees at least Maximin Share (MMS) of exposure for most of the producers and Envy-Free up to One item (EF1) fairness for every customer. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the effectiveness of FairRec in ensuring two-sided fairness while incurring a marginal loss in the overall recommendation quality.
Rankings of people and items are at the heart of selection-making, match-making, and recommender systems, ranging from employment sites to sharing economy platforms. As ranking positions influence the amount of attention the ranked subjects receive, biases in rankings can lead to unfair distribution of opportunities and resources, such as jobs or income. This paper proposes new measures and mechanisms to quantify and mitigate unfairness from a bias inherent to all rankings, namely, the position bias, which leads to disproportionately less attention being paid to low-ranked subjects. Our approach differs from recent fair ranking approaches in two important ways. First, existing works measure unfairness at the level of subject groups while our measures capture unfairness at the level of individual subjects, and as such subsume group unfairness. Second, as no single ranking can achieve individual attention fairness, we propose a novel mechanism that achieves amortized fairness, where attention accumulated across a series of rankings is proportional to accumulated relevance. We formulate the challenge of achieving amortized individual fairness subject to constraints on ranking quality as an online optimization problem and show that it can be solved as an integer linear program. Our experimental evaluation reveals that unfair attention distribution in rankings can be substantial, and demonstrates that our method can improve individual fairness while retaining high ranking quality.
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field.