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Is Fairness Truly Fair? Towards Reliable Lipschitz Fairness in Multi-Task Learning via Fixed-\texorpdfstring{$\delta$}{delta} Alignment

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Lipschitz-style individual fairness formalizes the idea that semantically similar examples should receive similar predictions, but its evaluation in multi-task learning (MTL) can be confounded by method-induced representation scales. This paper identifies threshold confounding: when the auditing tolerance is derived from each model's own representation distances, different algorithms are compared under different semantic thresholds. A threshold-drift analysis further shows how Bias rankings can change and identifies sufficient conditions for ranking preservation. We propose \textbf{ReLiF}, a reliability-aware framework that separates evaluation-time fixed-$\delta$ auditing from training-time controlled regularization. ReLiF uses a shared reference tolerance for comparable auditing and a violation-rate feedback controller to keep the Lipschitz surrogate active without letting it dominate stochastic training. This work also develops supporting analysis for threshold drift, reference-tolerance selection, and the relationship between the huberized training surrogate and its unsmoothed positive-margin counterpart. Experiments on clinical time-series benchmarks and NYUv2 (NYU Depth V2) dense prediction show that fixed-$\delta$ auditing exposes utility--fairness trade-offs that method-dependent thresholds can obscure. On NYUv2 with a ResNet50 backbone, ReLiF achieves competitive utility while substantially reducing aligned bias under shared fixed thresholds. On clinical benchmarks, ReLiF yields controlled fairness-regularized trade-offs, while fixed-$\delta$ auditing reveals that task-balancing baselines can sometimes achieve lower bias and that genuine utility--fairness trade-offs persist. These results support fixed-$\delta$ auditing as a semantically consistent protocol for evaluating Lipschitz fairness in MTL.

Junbo Ding, Xin Zang, Chenchen Pan, Donghao Song, Jiaxin Zhu, Danhuai Guo• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Semantic segmentationNYU v2 (val)
mIoU48.2
82
Depth EstimationNYU v2 (val)
RMSE0.661
72
Surface Normal EstimationNYUv2 (val)
mAE29.6527
26
Multi-task LearningNYU v2 (val)
Worst Performance48.2
7
Violation Rate AuditNYU V2
VR@δp758.62
7
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