Perfectly Parallel Fairness Certification of Neural Networks

Caterina Urban, Maria Christakis, Valentin Wüstholz, Fuyuan Zhang

Abstract

Recently, there is growing concern that machine-learned software, which currently assists or even automates decision making, reproduces, and in the worst case reinforces, bias present in the training data. The development of tools and techniques for certifying fairness of this software or describing its biases is, therefore, critical. In this paper, we propose a perfectly parallel static analysis for certifying fairness of feed-forward neural networks used for classification of tabular data. When certification succeeds, our approach provides definite guarantees, otherwise, it describes and quantifies the biased input space regions. We design the analysis to be sound, in practice also exact, and configurable in terms of scalability and precision, thereby enabling pay-as-you-go certification. We implement our approach in an open-source tool called Libra and demonstrate its effectiveness on neural networks trained on popular datasets.