# Tackling Algorithmic Bias in Neural-Network Classifiers using Wasserstein-2 Regularization

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a Wasserstein-2 regularization method to reduce algorithmic bias in neural network classifiers, applicable to large datasets and compatible with standard training procedures.

## Contribution

A novel Wasserstein-2 based regularization technique for neural networks that mitigates bias without altering architecture and scales efficiently to large datasets.

## Key findings

- Effective bias reduction demonstrated on Adult census, MNIST, CelebA datasets.
- Method is architecture-agnostic and compatible with standard SGD training.
- Regularization improves fairness metrics without sacrificing accuracy.

## Abstract

The increasingly common use of neural network classifiers in industrial and social applications of image analysis has allowed impressive progress these last years. Such methods are however sensitive to algorithmic bias, i.e. to an under- or an over-representation of positive predictions or to higher prediction errors in specific subgroups of images. We then introduce in this paper a new method to temper the algorithmic bias in Neural-Network based classifiers. Our method is Neural-Network architecture agnostic and scales well to massive training sets of images. It indeed only overloads the loss function with a Wasserstein-2 based regularization term for which we back-propagate the impact of specific output predictions using a new model, based on the Gateaux derivatives of the predictions distribution. This model is algorithmically reasonable and makes it possible to use our regularized loss with standard stochastic gradient-descent strategies. Its good behavior is assessed on the reference Adult census, MNIST, CelebA datasets.