On the Effects of Fairness to Adversarial Vulnerability

On the Effects of Fairness to Adversarial Vulnerability

Cuong Tran, Keyu Zhu, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Ferdinando Fioretto

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 521-529. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/58

Fairness and robustness are two important notions of learning models. Fairness ensures that models do not disproportionately harm (or benefit) some groups over others, while robustness measures the models' resilience against small input perturbations. While equally important properties, this paper illustrates a dichotomy between fairness and robustness, and analyzes when striving for fairness decreases the model robustness to adversarial samples. The reported analysis sheds light on the factors causing such contrasting behavior, suggesting that distance to the decision boundary across groups as a key factor. Experiments on non-linear models and different architectures validate the theoretical findings. In addition to the theoretical analysis, the paper also proposes a simple, yet effective, solution to construct models achieving good tradeoffs between fairness and robustness.
Keywords:
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Fairness and diversity
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Safety and robustness
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Trustworthy AI
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: CSO: Constraint optimization problems