journal article·2026-02-07Open access

Fair Classification Without Sensitive Attribute Labels via Dynamic Reweighting

Pilhyeon Lee, Sungho Park

Applied Sciences· Volume 16· Issue 4

Abstract

Fairness-aware classification with respect to sensitive attributes, such as gender and race, is one of the most important topics in machine learning. Although numerous studies have made outstanding progress through various approaches, one key limitation is that they necessarily require additional labels of sensitive attributes for training. This poses a significant challenge since sensitive attributes typically correspond to personal information. To this end, we propose a novel reweighting method that dynamically gives more weights to underrepresented groups across potential sensitive attributes. Without auxiliary networks or strong assumptions about sensitive attributes, the proposed method significantly improves fairness under various scenarios on benchmark datasets, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning · Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Artificial Intelligence, Inha University, Incheon 22212, Republic of Korea

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Republic of Korea

Funding

Incheon National University Research Grant

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