Algorithmic fairness in clustering aims to balance the proportions of instances assigned to each cluster with respect to a given sensitive attribute. While recently developed fair clustering algorithms optimize clustering objectives under specific fairness constraints, their inherent complexity or approximation often results in suboptimal clustering utility or numerical instability in practice. To resolve these limitations, we propose a new fair clustering algorithm based on a novel decomposition of the fair $K$-means clustering objective function. The proposed algorithm, called Fair Clustering via Alignment (FCA), operates by alternately (i) finding a joint probability distribution to align the data from different protected groups, and (ii) optimizing cluster centers in the aligned space. A key advantage of FCA is that it theoretically guarantees approximately optimal clustering utility for any given fairness level without complex constraints, thereby enabling high-utility fair clustering in practice. Experiments show that FCA outperforms existing methods by (i) attaining a superior trade-off between fairness level and clustering utility, and (ii) achieving near-perfect fairness without numerical instability.

This study examines the social and psychological benefits of immersive social AR/VR sport games by focusing on how users’ involvement in such games influences their psychological well-being. Specifically, we investigated (1) how interpersonal relationships (i.e., social presence and communication engagement in virtual environments) mediate the relationship between game involvement and well-being and (2) how these mediation effects depend on users’ social capital (i.e., loneliness). The findings showed that users’ involvement in AR/VR sport games enhances well-being via social presence and communication engagement. Further, loneliness moderates the mediation effect of social presence, but not the mediation effect of communication engagement. The findings make a theoretical contribution by addressing a gap in the existing literature on the impact of game involvement on psychological well-being. This study provides useful practical implications for mental health practitioners in developing guidelines for using AR/VR games to support mental health.

Hwaran Lee, Seokhee Hong, Joonsuk Park, Takyoung Kim, Meeyoung Cha, Yejin Choi, Byoungpil Kim, Gunhee Kim, Eun-Ju Lee, Yong Lim, Alice Oh, Sangchul Park, Jung-Woo Ha. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.