用无标签数据实现面部性别分类的公平性提升
Fairness Without Labels: Pseudo-Balancing for Bias Mitigation in Face Gender Classification
- 通过伪标签选择时强制种族平衡来缓解偏差
- 准确率提升6.53%,东亚群体性别差距缩小至5.01%
- 无需真实标签,适合缺乏标注数据的场景
面部性别分类模型常反映并放大训练数据中的社会偏见,导致不同性别和种族子群体表现不均。本文提出伪平衡策略,在半监督学习中仅使用种族平衡的无标签图像进行伪标签选择,无需真实标签。在两个场景下评估:一是基于FairFace数据集的无标签图像微调有偏分类器;二是故意构造不平衡数据以模拟偏见场景。所有模型在包含主要东亚人群的All-Age-Faces(AAF)基准上测试。结果表明,伪平衡在保持或提升准确率的同时显著改善公平性:整体准确率达79.81%(较基线提升6.53%),性别准确率差距减少44.17%;在东亚子组中,基线差距超过49%的问题被缩小至5.01%。这表明,即使无标签监督,仅凭一个种族平衡或轻微偏斜的无标签数据集,也可有效用于去偏。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Face gender classification models often reflect and amplify demographic biases present in their training data, leading to uneven performance across gender and racial subgroups. We introduce pseudo-balancing, a simple and effective strategy for mitigating such biases in semi-supervised learning. Our method enforces demographic balance during pseudo-label selection, using only unlabeled images from a race-balanced dataset without requiring access to ground-truth annotations. We evaluate pseudo-balancing under two conditions: (1) fine-tuning a biased gender classifier using unlabeled images from the FairFace dataset, and (2) stress-testing the method with intentionally imbalanced training data to simulate controlled bias scenarios. In both cases, models are evaluated on the All-Age-Faces (AAF) benchmark, which contains a predominantly East Asian population. Our results show that pseudo-balancing consistently improves fairness while preserving or enhancing accuracy. The method achieves 79.81% overall accuracy - a 6.53% improvement over the baseline - and reduces the gender accuracy gap by 44.17%. In the East Asian subgroup, where baseline disparities exceeded 49%, the gap is narrowed to just 5.01%. These findings suggest that even in the absence of label supervision, access to a demographically balanced or moderately skewed unlabeled dataset can serve as a powerful resource for debiasing existing computer vision models.
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