Much of the work in the field of group fairness addresses disparities between predefined groups based on protected features such as gender, age, and race, which need to be available at train, and often also at test, time. These approaches are static and retrospective, since algorithms designed to protect groups identified a priori cannot anticipate and protect the needs of different at-risk groups in the future. In this work we analyze the space of solutions for worst-case fairness beyond demographics, and propose Blind Pareto Fairness (BPF), a method that leverages no-regret dynamics to recover a fair minimax classifier that reduces worst-case risk of any potential subgroup of sufficient size, and guarantees that the remaining population receives the best possible level of service. BPF addresses fairness beyond demographics, that is, it does not rely on predefined notions of at-risk groups, neither at train nor at test time. Our experimental results show that the proposed framework improves worst-case risk in multiple standard datasets, while simultaneously providing better levels of service for the remaining population. The code is available at github.com/natalialmg/BlindParetoFairness

Data collection and sharing are pervasive aspects of modern society. This process can either be voluntary, as in the case of a person taking a facial image to unlock his/her phone, or incidental, such as traffic cameras collecting videos on pedestrians. An undesirable side effect of these processes is that shared data can carry information about attributes that users might consider as sensitive, even when such information is of limited use for the task. It is therefore desirable for both data collectors and users to design procedures that minimize sensitive information leakage. Balancing the competing objectives of providing meaningful individualized service levels and inference while obfuscating sensitive information is still an open problem. In this work, we take an information theoretic approach that is implemented as an unconstrained adversarial game between Deep Neural Networks in a principled, data-driven manner. This approach enables us to learn domain-preserving stochastic transformations that maintain performance on existing algorithms while minimizing sensitive information leakage.