Aligning Performance with Contribution: Towards Contribution-Aware Fair Recommendation

Abstract

Existing research on user fairness in recommender systems has developed diverse objectives. However, it has paid limited attention to a distinct distributive perspective: whether users' contributions to model learning should be reflected in the recommendation benefits they receive. We argue that, in addition to existing fairness protections, a fair system may account for the alignment between users' estimated contributions and the recommendation performance they receive. Such alignment can incentivize sustained and informative engagement, thereby supporting a sustainable recommendation ecosystem. To this end, we propose Contribution-Performance Fairness, a novel fairness perspective which requires recommendation performance to be aligned with estimated contribution across user groups and to remain equitable among users with comparable contributions within a same group. To instantiate this perspective, we introduce the Contribution-Performance Fair Recommender (CPFR), a framework applicable to different backbone recommenders. CPFR constructs ordered user groups from a training-dependent contribution considering interaction volume, loss alignment, and optimization intensity, and jointly optimizes recommendation accuracy with the two fairness requirements. A game-theoretic analysis shows that such alignment can strengthen contribution incentives and improve system-level recommendation accuracy under voluntary contribution. Experiments on three datasets and three backbone models demonstrate that CPFR achieves a strong accuracy--fairness trade-off under the proposed operational metric.