Christian Ganhör, David Penz, Navid Rekabsaz, Oleg Lesota, Markus Schedl,
"Unlearning Protected User Attributes in Recommendations with Adversarial Training"
: Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022), 7-2022
Original Titel:
Unlearning Protected User Attributes in Recommendations with Adversarial Training
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022)
Original Kurzfassung:
Collaborative filtering algorithms capture underlying consumption
patterns, including the ones specific to particular demographics
or protected information of users, e. g., gender, race, and location.
These encoded biases can influence the decision of a recommendation
system (RS) towards further separation of the contents provided
to various demographic subgroups, and raise privacy concerns
regarding the disclosure of users? protected attributes. In this
work, we investigate the possibility and challenges of removing
specific protected information of users from the learned interaction
representations of a RS algorithm, while maintaining its effectiveness.
Specifically, we incorporate adversarial training into the
state-of-the-art MultVAE architecture, resulting in a novel model,
Adversarial Variational Auto-Encoder with Multinomial Likelihood
(Adv-MultVAE), which aims at removing the implicit information
of protected attributes while preserving recommendation performance.
We conduct experiments on the MovieLens-1M and LFM-
2b-DemoBias datasets, and evaluate the effectiveness of the bias
mitigation method based on the inability of external attackers in
revealing the users? gender information from the model. Comparing
with baseline MultVAE, the results show that Adv-MultVAE, with
marginal deterioration in performance (w. r. t. NDCG and recall),
largely mitigates inherent biases in the model on both datasets.
Forschungs-