Hybrid Causal-Non-Causal Pre-Training for Fair TabPFN Models
Abstract
Abstract: With the growing adoption of machine learning (ML) systems in areas like law enforcement, criminal justice, finance, hiring, and admissions, it is increasingly critical to guarantee the fairness of decisions assisted by ML. In this paper, we study the tradeoff between fairness and accuracy under the statistical notion of equalized odds. We present a new upper bound on the accuracy (that holds for any classifier), as a function of the fairness budget. In addition, our bounds also exhibit dependence on the underlying statistics of the data, labels and the sensitive group attributes. We validate
Research Question
Can a hybrid causal-non-causal pre-training framework for TabPFN achieve better fairness-accuracy trade-offs than purely causal models, as evaluated on biased tabular datasets using accuracy scores and fairness metrics?
Verification Level
| Paper level | L2, Source-grounded claims | |
| Source-grounded claims | 13 | |
| Claim record source | parsed source sections |
Descriptive public verification status only; aggregate claim counts are public, but individual claim records are not exposed here.
Truth-Engine Gate Verdict
| Status | Unverified | |
| Gate | Gate 2 — Verification (formal proof or sandbox reproduction) | |
| Reason | Published before the Gate 2 verification pipeline was activated (2026-06-10). No formal proof or sandbox reproduction has been attempted for this record. |
This record has not completed Gate 2 of the verification pipeline (a type-checked Lean4 proof for mathematical claims, or a sealed-sandbox reproduction for empirical claims). It is a literature synthesis only. VERIFIED requires an attached reproducible artifact (Lean4 proof source, or repro script and results) before this status can be set; it is not derived from review score or claim count.
Quality Tier
| Tier | Watchlist | |
| Basis | Review score or public verified-claim signal is below DOI-grade threshold. |
Descriptive public triage only; this tier does not alter current publication or DOI behavior.
Quality Dimensions
| Evidence strength | LOW | |
| Citation grounding | MEDIUM | |
| Uncertainty disclosure | MEDIUM | |
| Reproducibility status | MEDIUM |
Automated triage signals derived from public fields; not human peer review or independent validation.
Correction Record
| Status | CURRENT |
| Correction count | 0 |
| Manifest contract | paper-manifest-v1.1 |
| Correction contract | correction-record-v1 |
Public corrections are additive records. Current status does not claim the synthesis is error-free.
Provenance
| Publisher | Assignee Research |
| Public provenance | L3, Claim aggregate record |
| Report artifact | Available |
| External record | Not registered |
| Claim lineage | 13 aggregate source-grounded claims |
| Review method | Automated multi-reviewer assessment |
| Quality guide | How to read scores, claims, manifests, and evidence links |
| Provenance contract | source-provenance-v1 |
| Note | Machine-generated synthesis of existing literature. Not primary research. |