FedFACT: A Provable Framework for Controllable Group-Fairness Calibration in Federated Learning

Li Zhang, Zhongxuan Han, XiaoHua Feng, Jiaming Zhang, Yuyuan Li, Chaochao Chen

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

With emerging application of Federated Learning (FL) in decision-making scenarios, it is imperative to regulate model fairness to prevent disparities across sensitive groups (e.g., female, male). Current research predominantly focuses on two concepts of group fairness within FL: Global Fairness (overall model disparity across all clients) and Local Fairness (the disparity within each client). However, the non-decomposable, non-differentiable nature of fairness criteria pose two fundamental, unresolved challenges for fair FL: (i) Harmonizing global and local fairness, especially in multi-class classification; (ii) Enabling a controllable, optimal accuracy-fairness trade-off. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel controllable federated group-fairness calibration framework, named FedFACT. FedFACT identifies the Bayes-optimal classifiers under both global and local fairness constraints in multi-class case, yielding models with minimal performance decline while guaranteeing fairness. To effectively realize an adjustable, optimal accuracy-fairness balance, we derive specific characterizations of the Bayes-optimal fair classifiers for reformulating fair FL as personalized cost-sensitive learning problem for in-processing, and bi-level optimization for post-processing. Theoretically, we provide convergence and generalization guarantees for FedFACT to approach the near-optimal accuracy under given fairness levels. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets across various data heterogeneity demonstrate that FedFACT consistently outperforms baselines in balancing accuracy and global-local fairness.