Subgraph Filtering for Fair Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2608.26437 · cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-26 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-26

Updated: 2026-08-26

Comments: ICONIP 2026

Code: https://github.com/haohuilu/SF-GNN

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Graph neural networks (GNNs) can exhibit unfair behavior even when sensitive attributes are excluded from node features, because graph topology and message passing propagate group-correlated signals

Terminology

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) can exhibit unfair behavior even when sensitive attributes are excluded from node features, because graph topology and message passing propagate group-correlated signals under sensitive homophily. Existing fairness-aware GNN methods mainly constrain representations or prediction distributions at a global level, without explicitly controlling the local structural pathways through which biased information propagates during aggregation. We propose Subgraph Filtering for Fair Graph Neural Networks (SF-GNN), a lightweight and architecture-agnostic framework that mitigates structural bias at its source. SF-GNN identifies bias-prone edges by combining sensitive homophily with structural propagation amplifiers, including hub participation and triadic closure. It then incorporates stochastic edge filtering into each message-passing step to selectively downweight or remove these edges while preserving the remaining graph structure. Training further incorporates a statistical-parity regularizer with a warm-up schedule to stabilize optimization. Experiments on five benchmark datasets show that SF-GNN achieves consistent fairness improvements while maintaining competitive predictive performance, leading to a better fairness--accuracy trade-off than recent fairness-aware GNN baselines.

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