Optimal Transport-Embedded Neural Network for Fairness Transfer Problem

Abstract

Research on neuromorphic computing has gained popularity in recent years. In particular, regularized embedded neural systems have been applied in several significant real-world situations, such as recommendation systems and transfer learning. This paper deals with the fairness transfer learning problem, which has been insufficiently explored. In fairness transfer settings, the source domain has limit-tagged training samples, which may lead to performance degradation in the target domain. To solve such problems, a linear data-augmentation-based optimal transport-embedded neural network is proposed in this paper. It can augment the source samples to make the distribution of the source domain balanced and can align the source and target distributions simultaneously. Moreover, the distribution of the augmented data by mixup is limited to a certain bound that can avoid the abnormal samples generated. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been demonstrated in several transfer learning tests, including regression and classification. In 1-shot and 3-shot classification tasks on the Office dataset, our method’s accuracy is 4.8 and 3.9% better, respectively, than the second-best model. Additionally, our model’s performance is about 2–3 percentage points superior to the second-best model in the OfficeHome dataset. It is simple yet effective, making it perfect for low-power edge AI applications.