Research map / Learning theory and algorithms / Fairness
Fairness in recommendation and ranking
Defines fairness objectives for users and items in recommender systems and rankings.
20 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.
10 papers in 2023–24 and 7 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic shrank, from 6.0% to 5.0%.
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 · Beyond Parity: Fairness Objectives for Collaborative Filtering (NeurIPS 2017 · 156 citations)
- 2021 · Two-sided fairness in rankings via Lorenz dominance (NeurIPS 2021 · 1 citation)
- 2022 · Online Certification of Preference-Based Fairness for Personalized Recommender Systems (AAAI 2022 · 32 citations)
- 2023 · Fair Representation Learning for Recommendation: A Mutual Information Perspective (AAAI 2023 · 31 citations)
- 2024 · Intra- and Inter-group Optimal Transport for User-Oriented Fairness in Recommender Systems (AAAI 2024 · 8 citations)
- 2025 · CUGF: A Reliable and Fair Recommendation Framework (AAAI 2025 · 2 citations)
- 2026 · COPF: An Online Framework for Deployment-Stable Counterfactual Fairness in Evolving Graphs (ICML 2026 · 0 citations)
Earliest papers here
- Beyond Parity: Fairness Objectives for Collaborative Filtering (NeurIPS 2017 · 156 citations)
- Two-sided fairness in rankings via Lorenz dominance (NeurIPS 2021 · 1 citation)
- Online Certification of Preference-Based Fairness for Personalized Recommender Systems (AAAI 2022 · 32 citations)
What has been tried
15 papers here report 166 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 62%, no clear effect 7%, hurt 25%, mixed 5%. 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 intra-group stage | Beauty · NDCG | 0.245 -> 0.274 | Helped | Intra- and Inter-group Optimal Transport for User-Oriented Fairness in Recommender Systems (AAAI 2024 · 8 citations) |
| Increase re-weighting strength p | Líbímseti.cz test · Utility | Hurt | Leveraging Opposite Gender Interaction Ratio as a Path towards Fairness in Online Dating Recommendations Based on User Sexual Orientation (AAAI 2024 · 8 citations) | |
| increase the fairness multiplier above zero | FairJob · DP | Helped | FairJob: A Real-World Dataset for Fairness in Online Systems (NeurIPS 2024 · 1 citation) | |
| Replace max-min fairness with Nash welfare fairness | User-item fairness tradeoff · user Nash welfare | Mixed | User-item fairness tradeoffs in recommendations (NeurIPS 2024 · 0 citations) | |
| Increase the risk threshold α | AmazonOffice · average prediction set size | Helped | ENSUR: Equitable and Statistically Unbiased Recommendation (ICML 2025) |
What reviewers will expect
Datasets and baselines named in the 7 papers of this approach from 2024–2026 that have a full-text summary. Leaving out the common ones is a frequent review question.
Datasets
- AmazonOffice · 2 of 7 papers
- MovieLens · 2 of 7 papers
Recent preprints
Loading recent arXiv preprints…
Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 17 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- Hefei University of Technology · 2 papers
- IBM · 2 papers
- The Education University of Hong Kong · 2 papers
- University of Science and Technology of China · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 20 key papersOpen the topic in the interactive map
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Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Causal and policy fairness in decisions (75 papers)
- Fairness auditing and regularization (65 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).