  Much research has been devoted to the problem of learning fair
representations; however, they do not explicitly the relationship between
latent representations. In many real-world applications, there may be causal
relationships between latent representations. Furthermore, most fair
representation learning methods focus on group-level fairness and are based on
correlations, ignoring the causal relationships underlying the data. In this
work, we theoretically demonstrate that using the structured representations
enable downstream predictive models to achieve counterfactual fairness, and
then we propose the Counterfactual Fairness Variational AutoEncoder (CF-VAE) to
obtain structured representations with respect to domain knowledge. The
experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better fairness and
accuracy performance than the benchmark fairness methods.
