Research map / Learning theory and algorithms / Fairness
Fair allocation and selection
Design fair rankings, resource allocation and subset selection algorithms with provable fairness guarantees.
69 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2017–2026) · an approach in Fairness, keyword cluster “fair · classifier · classification”
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.
23 papers in 2023–24 and 17 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic shrank, from 13.8% 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 · Meritocratic Fairness for Cross-Population Selection (ICML 2017 · 37 citations)
- 2019 · Comparative Document Summarisation via Classification (AAAI 2019 · 7 citations)
- 2020 · Bursting the Filter Bubble: Fairness-Aware Network Link Prediction (AAAI 2020 · 82 citations)
- 2021 · Fair Sortition Made Transparent (NeurIPS 2021 · 11 citations)
- 2022 · Equity Promotion in Online Resource Allocation (AAAI 2022 · 3 citations)
- 2023 · Rawlsian Fairness in Online Bipartite Matching: Two-Sided, Group, and Individual (AAAI 2023 · 12 citations)
- 2024 · Utility-Fairness Trade-Offs and How to Find Them (CVPR 2024 · 8 citations)
- 2025 · Fairness under Competition (NeurIPS 2025 · 1 citation)
- 2026 · Putting Fair Division on the Map (AAAI 2026 · 1 citation)
Earliest papers here
- Meritocratic Fairness for Cross-Population Selection (ICML 2017 · 37 citations)
- Comparative Document Summarisation via Classification (AAAI 2019 · 7 citations)
- Deep Bayesian Trust: A Dominant and Fair Incentive Mechanism for Crowd (AAAI 2019)
What has been tried
52 papers here report 388 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 59%, no clear effect 10%, hurt 23%, 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 two-sided cost constraint | SynSparse · Cost | 2444.50 -> 1399.56 | Helped | Towards Fairness in Online Service with K Servers and Its Application on Fair Food Delivery (AAAI 2024 · 2 citations) |
| Replace β with (1-ε)β in the LP | Bipartite proportional fair matching (α = 0) · probability of satisfying β-fairness exactly | 1-2\exp \Big(- \frac{\epsilon^2\beta \sum (e\in E)x_e}{28} \Big) | Helped | Proportionally Fair Matching via Randomized Rounding (AAAI 2025 · 0 citations) |
| Increase ε | Graph coverage, clustering, and recommender system · fairness violation | Mixed | Improved Algorithms for Fair Matroid Submodular Maximization (NeurIPS 2025 · 0 citations) | |
| Relax institution-wise capacity reservations using α rather than enforcing strict reservations | Synthetic, Pareto utilities · preference-based fairness (P^(1)) | 0.45 to 0.90 | Helped | Centralized Selection with Preferences in the Presence of Biases (ICML 2024 · 0 citations) |
What reviewers will expect
Datasets and baselines named in the 13 papers of this approach from 2025–2026 that have a full-text summary. Leaving out the common ones is a frequent review question.
Datasets
- ACS Income · 2 of 13 papers
Recent preprints
Loading recent arXiv preprints…
Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 40 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- University of Maryland, College Park · 4 papers
- University of Massachusetts Amherst · 3 papers
- Gran Sasso Science Institute · 2 papers
- Ca’ Foscari University of Venice · 2 papers
- University of Washington · 2 papers
- Georgia Institute of Technology · 2 papers
- Carnegie Mellon University · 2 papers
- Columbia University · 2 papers
- New Jersey Institute of Technology · 2 papers
- Microsoft · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 35 key papersOpen the topic in the interactive map
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Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Fairness-constrained classification (148 papers)
- Post-processing and transport for fairness (101 papers)
- Minimax fairness via sampling (38 papers)
Elsewhere in the topic
- Causal and policy fairness in decisions (75 papers)
- Fairness auditing and regularization (65 papers)
- Fairness in recommendation and ranking (20 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).