Detecting and Mitigating Bias by Treating Fairness as a Symmetry Operation
Machine learning systems deployed in high stakes socioeconomic settings routinely display bias. We formalize bias as a symmetry breaking operation: a classifier is fair if its outputs remain invariant under the counterfactual operation of switching a sensitive attribute, with merit features held fixed. We implement loss based regularization as a symmetry restoring mechanism and evaluate the framework on four synthetic datasets with varying levels of noise, correlation, and bias. The framework achieves upwards of 90\% violation reduction, with accuracy costs around 5\%. This framework does not require causal graph knowledge, is computationally lightweight, and generalizes to any sensitive ...
| Authors | Nishit Singh |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.