动态修正模型偏见,不降性能还能提升少数群体表现。
FairNet: Dynamic Fairness Correction without Performance Loss via Contrastive Conditional LoRA
- 用对比损失训练条件LoRA,仅对检测到的偏见样本修正。
- 在多个视觉与语言数据集上,少数群体准确率提升5%以上。
- 支持完整、部分或无敏感属性标签,适合真实场景应用。
确保机器学习模型的公平性是一项关键挑战。现有去偏方法常导致性能下降,依赖静态修正策略,且在少数群体数据稀疏时表现不佳。此外,其对敏感属性的利用往往不够合理,要么过度依赖完整标签,要么完全忽略。为此,我们提出FairNet,一种动态的、实例级的公平性修正框架。FairNet结合偏见检测器与条件低秩适配(LoRA),仅对检测出的偏见实例激活修正机制,从而保留无偏实例的性能。核心贡献是设计了一种新的对比损失函数,专门用于最小化不同敏感组间同类样本的表征差异,并有效缓解少数群体的欠拟合问题。FairNet可灵活处理完整、部分或完全缺失敏感属性标签的场景。理论分析表明,在偏见检测器中等真阳性率/假阳性率条件下,FairNet可在不降低整体性能的前提下提升最差群体表现,甚至带来轻微性能增益。跨多种视觉与语言基准的全面实证评估验证了其有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Ensuring fairness in machine learning models is a critical challenge. Existing debiasing methods often compromise performance, rely on static correction strategies, and struggle with data sparsity, particularly within minority groups. Furthermore, their utilization of sensitive attributes is often suboptimal, either depending excessively on complete attribute labeling or disregarding these attributes entirely. To overcome these limitations, we propose FairNet, a novel framework for dynamic, instance-level fairness correction. FairNet integrates a bias detector with conditional low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which enables selective activation of the fairness correction mechanism exclusively for instances identified as biased, and thereby preserve performance on unbiased instances. A key contribution is a new contrastive loss function for training the LoRA module, specifically designed to minimize intra-class representation disparities across different sensitive groups and effectively address underfitting in minority groups. The FairNet framework can flexibly handle scenarios with complete, partial, or entirely absent sensitive attribute labels. Theoretical analysis confirms that, under moderate TPR/FPR for the bias detector, FairNet can enhance the performance of the worst group without diminishing overall model performance, and potentially yield slight performance improvements. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across diverse vision and language benchmarks validate the effectiveness of FairNet.
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