Fed-FUEL: fairness and utility enhancing agnostic federated learning framework

Abstract Federated learning (FL) is an emerging communication-efficient and collaborative learning paradigm of machine learning with privacy guarantees. As these advancements unfold, adapting FL for fairness-aware learning becomes crucial. In this context, we propose a pre-processing fairness and utility (balanced accuracy) enhancing agnostic federated learning framework (Fed-FUEL) that mitigates discrimination embedded in the non-independent identically distributed data. We contribute a novel adaptive data manipulation method that mitigates discrimination embedded in the data at client side during optimization, resulting in an optimized and fair centralized server. This pre-processing approach abstracts the model architecture from the equation, offering a significant advantage in a federated environment. This abstraction not only facilitates a broader application across diverse model architectures without necessitating modifications but also sidesteps the potential complexities and inefficiencies associated with model-specific in-processing methods. Extensive experiments with a range of publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the competing baselines in terms of both discrimination mitigation and predictive performance. Our model effectively adapts to both statistical and causal fairness notions, as shown through our experiments.