  In this paper, we propose FairNN a neural network that performs joint feature
representation and classification for fairness-aware learning. Our approach
optimizes a multi-objective loss function in which (a) learns a fair
representation by suppressing protected attributes (b) maintains the
information content by minimizing a reconstruction loss and (c) allows for
solving a classification task in a fair manner by minimizing the classification
error and respecting the equalized odds-based fairness regularized. Our
experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate that such a joint approach is
superior to separate treatment of unfairness in representation learning or
supervised learning. Additionally, our regularizers can be adaptively weighted
to balance the different components of the loss function, thus allowing for a
very general framework for conjoint fair representation learning and decision
making.
