Towards Fair Graph Learning Without Demographic Supervision

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong predictive performance across a wide range of applications. However, their increasing deployment has raised critical fairness concerns, as these models can inherit and amplify existing biases. Most existing fairness approaches rely on explicit demographic information, either directly available or inferred, to measure and mitigate bias. In real-world settings, however, such information is often unavailable or legally prohibited to infer due to privacy concerns, legal restrictions, or regulatory constraints, which substantially limits the applicability of these methods. To address this challenge, we propose Demographic-Independent Fair Graph Learning (DIFGL), a novel framework for fair graph learning without demographic supervision. DIFGL mitigates group unfairness by minimizing disparities in individual treatment across implicitly identified subgroups, thereby enforcing fairness without requiring explicit demographic information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DIFGL achieves significant improvements in fairness while maintaining competitive predictive performance.