Title
Automatic Fairness Testing of Neural Classifiers Through Adversarial Sampling
Abstract
Although deep learning has demonstrated astonishing performance in many applications, there are still concerns about its dependability. One desirable property of deep learning applications with societal impact is fairness (i.e., non-discrimination). Unfortunately, discrimination might be intrinsically embedded into the models due to the discrimination in the training data. As a countermeasure, fairness testing systemically identifies discriminatory samples, which can be used to retrain the model and improve the model’s fairness. Existing fairness testing approaches however have two major limitations. First, they only work well on traditional machine learning models and have poor performance (e.g., effectiveness and efficiency) on deep learning models. Second, they only work on simple structured (e.g., tabular) data and are not applicable for domains such as text. In this work, we bridge the gap by proposing a scalable and effective approach for systematically searching for discriminatory samples while extending existing fairness testing approaches to address a more challenging domain, i.e., text classification. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach only employs lightweight procedures like gradient computation and clustering, which is significantly more scalable and effective. Experimental results show that on average, our approach explores the search space much more effectively (9.62 and 2.38 times more than the state-of-the-art methods respectively on tabular and text datasets) and generates much more discriminatory samples (24.95 and 2.68 times) within a same reasonable time. Moreover, the retrained models reduce discrimination by 57.2 and 60.2 percent respectively on average.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TSE.2021.3101478
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Deep learning,fairness testing,individual discrimination,gradient
Journal
48
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
0098-5589
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
20
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Peixin Zhang100.34
wang jingyi27216.19
Jun Sun31407120.35
xinyu459030.19
Guoliang Dong5282.49
Xingen Wang621.73
Ting Dai7142.27
Jin Song Dong81369107.12