Fair representation learning encodes user data to ensure fairness and utility, regardless of the downstream application. However, learning individually fair representations, i.e., guaranteeing that similar individuals are treated similarly, remains challenging in high-dimensional settings such as computer vision. In this work, we introduce LASSI, the first representation learning method for certifying individual fairness of high-dimensional data. Our key insight is to leverage recent advances in generative modeling to capture the set of similar individuals in the generative latent space. This allows learning individually fair representations where similar individuals are mapped close together, by using adversarial training to minimize the distance between their representations. Finally, we employ randomized smoothing to provably map similar individuals close together, in turn ensuring that local robustness verification of the downstream application results in end-to-end fairness certification. Our experimental evaluation on challenging real-world image data demonstrates that our method increases certified individual fairness by up to 60%, without significantly affecting task utility.
We introduce a novel certification method for parametrized perturbations by generalizing randomized smoothing. Using this method, we construct a provable classifier that can establish state-of-the-art robustness against semantic perturbations including geometric transformations (e.g., rotation, translation), for different types of interpolation, and, for the first time, volume changes on audio data. Our experimental results indicate that the method is practically effective: for ResNet-50 on ImageNet, it achieves rotational robustness provable up to ±30 • for 28% of images.
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