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This paper introduces REMI, a novel framework that automates the localization, explanation, and mitigation of individual discrimination in data-driven software systems. By treating counterfactual fairness as a relational invariant discovery problem, REMI employs a bidirectional relational explanation framework to identify fairness violations in paired examples. The results show that REMI successfully localizes fairness bugs in over 83% of cases and reduces discriminatory decisions in black-box models by up to 70%, outperforming existing methods significantly.
REMI can identify and mitigate fairness bugs in software systems with over 83% accuracy, transforming how we address discrimination in AI.
Data-driven software systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes socio-economic domains, from criminal justice to financial lending. However, these systems often exhibit individual discrimination---unjustified disparities in which a program yields different outcomes for similar individuals who differ only in their protected attributes (e.g., race, gender, age). While existing research has focused on detecting and quantifying these bugs, there remains a critical lack of principled mechanisms to explain and localize individual fairness bugs. Current explanation techniques are largely designed for single-input decisions rather than the relational nature of discrimination, which inherently involves a comparison between an original and a counterfactual pair. We present REMI, a framework for the automated localization, explanation, and mitigation of individual discrimination. Inspired by loop-invariant synthesis in formal methods, we treat counterfactual fairness as a relational invariant discovery problem. We introduce a bidirectional relational explanation framework that learns over paired examples $(x, x')$ to identify regions of the input space where fairness is violated. Unlike traditional one-way implication pairs used in invariant inference, our approach enforces bidirectional constraints: requiring identical outcomes for both original and counterfactual samples. REMI utilizes three data-alignment techniques to infer interpretable rule-based models that act as"fairness invariants."These rules serve as guardrails to selectively block or relabel unfair predictions without requiring model retraining. Our evaluation on symbolic and neural network programs demonstrates that REMI localizes ground-truth fairness bugs in over 83% of cases, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines and reducing discriminatory decisions in black-box models by up to 70%.
