FairRec: Fairness Testing for Deep Recommender Systems

Abstract: Deep learning-based recommender systems (DRSs) are increasingly and widely deployed in the industry, which brings significant convenience to people's daily life in different ways. However, recommender systems are also shown to suffer from multiple issues,e.g., the echo chamber and the Matthew effect, of which the notation of "fairness" plays a core role.While many fairness notations and corresponding fairness testing approaches have been developed for traditional deep classification models, they are essentially hardly applicable to DRSs. One major difficulty is that there still lacks a systematic understanding and mapping between the existing fairness notations and the diverse testing requirements for deep recommender systems, not to mention further testing or debugging activities. To address the gap, we propose FairRec, a unified framework that supports fairness testing of DRSs from multiple customized perspectives, e.g., model utility, item diversity, item popularity, etc. We also propose a novel, efficient search-based testing approach to tackle the new challenge, i.e., double-ended discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm, to effectively search for hidden fairness issues in the form of certain disadvantaged groups from a vast number of candidate groups. Given the testing report, by adopting a simple re-ranking mitigation strategy on these identified disadvantaged groups, we show that the fairness of DRSs can be significantly improved. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple industry-level DRSs adopted by leading companies. The results confirm that FairRec is effective and efficient in identifying the deeply hidden fairness issues, e.g., achieving 95% testing accuracy with half to 1/8 time.