Avoiding Structural Failure Modes in Tabular Fair SSL: Online Primal-Dual Allocation under Confidence Gating
Semi-supervised learning (SSL) enables prediction with limited labels, but high-stakes tabular applications (medical, credit, recidivism) require statistical fairness guarantees. We identify a structural conflict in tabular fair SSL through a diagnostic stress test: under confidence-gated pseudo-labeling, moment-matching fairness regularizers can trigger two failure modes -- Masking Collapse (fairness erodes confidence, starving pseudo-labels) and Trivial Saturation (drift to constant predictors). We propose Online Primal-Dual Allocation (OPDA), an online controller that schedules fairness and entropy-based stability penalties using violation, risk, and pseudo-label health signals, avoidi...
| Authors | Hangchuan Liang, Changchun Li |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 June 2026 |
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