UniFair: A unified fair clustering approach based on separation and compactness

arXiv:2606.04777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clustering is increasingly used to support high-impact decisions, yet standard objectives such as k-means can produce clusterings that treat demographic groups unequally. Existing fair clustering methods typically optimize a single notion of fairness and often overlook how clustering costs interact with the geometry of the induced decision boundaries. We propose extsc{UniFair}, a unified framework that jointly optimizes separation fairness and social fairness. Separation fairness encourages protected groups to lie farther from the induced decision boundaries, while social fairness reduces disparities in within-cluster distortion by penalizing group-wise clustering costs. We develop gradient-based optimization procedures for separation-fair and unified k-means objectives, and extend them to deep clustering by enforcing the same criteria in the latent space of an autoencoder. Experiments on tabular and image datasets show that extsc{UniFair} reduces both boundary-related and cost-based group disparities with only a modest increase in clustering loss.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-06-04