Research map / Learning theory and algorithms / Fairness
Minimax fairness via sampling
Reach group fairness by reweighting or actively sampling data, including without demographic labels.
38 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2018–2026) · 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.
10 papers in 2023–24 and 12 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic grew, from 6.0% to 8.6%.
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
- 2018 · Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization (ICML 2018 · 211 citations)
- 2019 · Policy Learning for Fairness in Ranking (NeurIPS 2019 · 97 citations)
- 2020 · Data preprocessing to mitigate bias: A maximum entropy based approach (ICML 2020 · 36 citations)
- 2021 · Unintended Selection: Persistent Qualification Rate Disparities and Interventions (NeurIPS 2021 · 5 citations)
- 2022 · Active Sampling for Min-Max Fairness (ICML 2022 · 6 citations)
- 2023 · Fair and Robust Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects for Policy Learning (ICML 2023 · 5 citations)
- 2024 · Providing Fair Recourse over Plausible Groups (AAAI 2024 · 3 citations)
- 2025 · Active Fourier Auditor for Estimating Distributional Properties of ML Models (AAAI 2025 · 1 citation)
- 2026 · Maximin Relative Improvement: Fair Learning as a Bargaining Problem (ICML 2026 · 0 citations)
Earliest papers here
- Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization (ICML 2018 · 211 citations)
- On preserving non-discrimination when combining expert advice (NeurIPS 2018 · 17 citations)
- Policy Learning for Fairness in Ranking (NeurIPS 2019 · 97 citations)
What has been tried
28 papers here report 256 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 60%, no clear effect 8%, hurt 27%, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vary the label budget | CelebA · fairness violation | Helped | Fairness without Harm: An Influence-Guided Active Sampling Approach (NeurIPS 2024 · 1 citation) | |
| Increase spherical harmonic encoding size | FAIR-Earth land-sea classification · island cross-entropy loss | Hurt | No Location Left Behind: Measuring and Improving the Fairness of Implicit Representations for Earth Data (ICLR 2025 · 0 citations) | |
| Add surrogate outcomes to clustered conformal inference | Moderna COVE (age-comorbidity groups) · AvgSize | 4.48 -> 3.61 | Helped | Bridging Fairness and Efficiency in Conformal Inference: A Surrogate-Assisted Group-Clustered Approach (ICML 2025) |
What reviewers will expect
Datasets and baselines named in the 8 papers of this approach from 2025–2026 that have a full-text summary. Leaving out the common ones is a frequent review question.
Datasets
- simulated data · 2 of 8 papers
Recent preprints
Loading recent arXiv preprints…
Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 22 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- Harvard University · 3 papers
- University of California, Santa Cruz · 2 papers
- Inria · 2 papers
- Amazon · 2 papers
- University of Tsukuba · 2 papers
- RIKEN · 2 papers
- Administration Economique · 2 papers
- École Polytechnique · 2 papers
- Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l&#x · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 31 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)
- Fair allocation and selection (69 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).