Learning Fair Representations with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Despite recent advances in fairness-aware machine learning, predictive models often exhibit discriminatory behavior towards marginalized groups. Such unfairness might arise from biased training data, model design, or representational disparities across groups, posing significant challenges in high-stakes decision-making domains such as college admissions. While existing fair learning models aim to mitigate bias, achieving an optimal trade-off between fairness and accuracy remains a challenge. Moreover, the reliance on black-box models hinders interpretability, limiting their applicability in socially sensitive domains. In this paper, we try to circumvent these issues by integrating Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) within a fair adversarial learning framework. Leveraging the adversarial robustness and interpretability of KANs, our approach enables a balance between fairness and accuracy. To further facilitate this balance, we propose an adaptive penalty update mechanism that dynamically adjusts fairness constraints during the model training. We conduct numerical experiments on two real-world college admissions datasets, across three different optimization strategies. The results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of KANs by consistently outperforming the baseline fair learning models, and maintaining high predictive accuracy while achieving competitive fairness across sensitive attributes.