title: Predict Responsibly: Increasing Fairness by Learning to Defer
abstract: When machine learning models are used for high-stakes decisions, they should predict accurately, fairly, and responsibly. To fulfill these three requirements, a model must be able to output a reject option (i.e. say "``I Don't Know") when it is not qualified to make a prediction. In this work, we propose learning to defer, a method by which a model can defer judgment to a downstream decision-maker such as a human user. We show that learning to defer generalizes the rejection learning framework in two ways: by considering the effect of other agents in the decision-making process, and by allowing for optimization of complex objectives. We propose a learning algorithm which accounts for potential biases held by decision-makerslater in a pipeline. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that learning
  to defer can make a model not only more accurate but also less biased. Even when
  operated by highly biased users, we show that
  deferring models can still greatly improve the fairness of the entire pipeline.
authors: David Madras Toniann Pitassi Richard Zemel
hIndex: Richard Zemel 68