Vertical federated learning (VFL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning
paradigm that can learn models from features distributed on different platforms
in a privacy-preserving way. Since in real-world applications the data may
contain bias on fairness-sensitive features (e.g., gender), VFL models may
inherit bias from training data and become unfair for some user groups.
However, existing fair machine learning methods usually rely on the centralized
storage of fairness-sensitive features to achieve model fairness, which are
usually inapplicable in federated scenarios. In this paper, we propose a fair
vertical federated learning framework (FairVFL), which can improve the fairness
of VFL models. The core idea of FairVFL is to learn unified and fair
representations of samples based on the decentralized feature fields in a
privacy-preserving way. Specifically, each platform with fairness-insensitive
features first learns local data representations from local features. Then,
these local representations are uploaded to a server and aggregated into a
unified representation for the target task. In order to learn a fair unified
representation, we send it to each platform storing fairness-sensitive features
and apply adversarial learning to remove bias from the unified representation
inherited from the biased data. Moreover, for protecting user privacy, we
further propose a contrastive adversarial learning method to remove private
information from the unified representation in server before sending it to the
platforms keeping fairness-sensitive features. Experiments on three real-world
datasets validate that our method can effectively improve model fairness with
user privacy well-protected.