Research map / Learning theory and algorithms / Fairness
Causal and policy fairness in decisions
Frames fairness in decision-making through causal analysis, preference-based notions and optimal fair policies.
75 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2017–2026) · an approach in Fairness, keyword cluster “decision · making · systems”
State History Tried Checklist Preprints Who Export
Where it stands
Not enough benchmark data Fewer than four papers report the same benchmark, so there is no record to follow.
31 papers in 2023–24 and 17 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic shrank, from 18.6% to 12.1%.
How this is decided
A benchmark is tracked when at least four papers of this approach report their own method on the same dataset and metric in at least two different years. Its record is the best number reported up to 2024 compared with the best reported in 2025–26: still improving means at least 1% better, flat means at most 0.2% better with at least two papers from 2025–26 trying. Numbers on a different scale from the rest (a fraction among percentages) and far outliers are left out. Results come from different papers with different setups, so they are signals, not head-to-head comparisons. The share of papers is counted at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI.
How it got here
Most cited paper of each year
- 2017 · Counterfactual Fairness (NeurIPS 2017 · 842 citations)
- 2018 · Fairness in Decision-Making — The Causal Explanation Formula (AAAI 2018 · 202 citations)
- 2019 · Path-Specific Counterfactual Fairness (AAAI 2019 · 239 citations)
- 2020 · Perpetual Voting: Fairness in Long-Term Decision Making (AAAI 2020 · 38 citations)
- 2021 · District-Fair Participatory Budgeting (AAAI 2021 · 17 citations)
- 2022 · Achieving Long-Term Fairness in Sequential Decision Making (AAAI 2022 · 16 citations)
- 2023 · Fairness and Explainability: Bridging the Gap towards Fair Model Explanations (AAAI 2023 · 24 citations)
- 2024 · Promoting Fair Vaccination Strategies through Influence Maximization: A Case Study on COVID-19 Spread (AAAI 2024 · 7 citations)
- 2025 · Fairness-Accuracy Trade-Offs: A Causal Perspective (AAAI 2025 · 11 citations)
- 2026 · Desirable Effort Fairness and Optimality Trade-offs in Strategic Learning (ICML 2026 · 0 citations)
Earliest papers here
- Counterfactual Fairness (NeurIPS 2017 · 842 citations)
- From Parity to Preference-based Notions of Fairness in Classification (NeurIPS 2017 · 103 citations)
- Fairness in Decision-Making — The Causal Explanation Formula (AAAI 2018 · 202 citations)
What has been tried
57 papers here report 427 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 60%, no clear effect 11%, hurt 22%, mixed 8%. Papers mostly publish changes that helped, so "helped" is over-represented.
Ablations in recent papers
| What was changed | Measured on | Result | Effect | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add the FAIAS selector to AdvDeb | COMPAS (Race) · accuracy | Helped | Adversarial Fairness Network (AAAI 2024 · 3 citations) | |
| Choose BN = ∅ rather than BN = {Z, W} | COMPAS · SPM | Mixed | Reconciling Predictive and Statistical Parity: A Causal Approach (AAAI 2024 · 3 citations) | |
| Add fairness-aware knot selection | ELS, single fold · test MSE | 0.151 -> 0.141 | Helped | Fair Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines for Ensuring Equity and Transparency (AAAI 2024 · 2 citations) |
| Increase the number of similar individuals from 5 to 10 | Adapted Adult test set · queried individuals identified with bias-attr=0 as reason | 56.4% -> 76.8% | Helped | Identifying Reasons for Bias: An Argumentation-Based Approach (AAAI 2024 · 2 citations) |
| use empirical-Bayes priors instead of a uniform prior | Adult: Other, Under 18, Female (n_S=2) · confidence/credible interval | [-0.190, 0.488] -> [-0.240, 0.014] (lambda = 0.5); [-0.190, 0.488] -> [-0.236, 0.037] (lambda = 1); [-0.190, 0.488] -> [ | Mixed | Size-adaptive Hypothesis Testing for Fairness (NeurIPS 2025 · 1 citation) |
| increase the benefit fairness coefficient βΛ | Settings 1 and 2 · benefit fairness | Helped | A Causal Lens for Learning Long-term Fair Policies (ICLR 2025 · 0 citations) |
What reviewers will expect
Datasets and baselines named in the 9 papers of this approach from 2025–2026 that have a full-text summary. Leaving out the common ones is a frequent review question.
Datasets
- COMPAS · 3 of 9 papers
- Adult · 2 of 9 papers
- German Credit · 2 of 9 papers
Recent preprints
Loading recent arXiv preprints…
Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 48 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- Carnegie Mellon University · 5 papers
- Columbia University · 4 papers
- Harvard University · 3 papers
- Purdue University · 3 papers
- University of Illinois Chicago · 2 papers
- Zurich University of Applied Sciences · 2 papers
- University of Zurich · 2 papers
- Stanford University · 2 papers
- University of Toronto · 2 papers
- University of California, Santa Cruz · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 40 key papersOpen the topic in the interactive map
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Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Fairness auditing and regularization (65 papers)
- Fairness in recommendation and ranking (20 papers)
Elsewhere in the topic
- Fairness-constrained classification (148 papers)
- Post-processing and transport for fairness (101 papers)
- Fair allocation and selection (69 papers)
- Minimax fairness via sampling (38 papers)
Benchmark numbers, ablations and baseline numbers are extracted by AI from each paper's full text and can be wrong; the paper is the authority. Data: results index of 2026-11-02, citation counts from OpenAlex (2026-10-09).