剖析医学AI代理在胸部X光诊断中的偏见来源,揭示其复杂流程如何引入新偏差。
DUCX: Decomposing Unfairness in Tool-Using Chest X-ray Agents
- 分阶段拆解代理系统中的公平性问题,识别工具使用、路由和推理三类偏差
- 实验显示端到端公平性差距最高达20.79%,工具可用性下子群体性能差可达50%
- 强调需从过程层面审计公平性,适合医疗AI安全与伦理研究者参考
随着具备工具调用能力的临床AI系统在胸部X光问答等任务中广泛应用,其多模块协同架构虽提升灵活性,但也引入了超越单一模型的新偏见路径。本文提出DUCX,对基于MedRAX的工具型胸部X光代理进行系统性公平性审计。通过分阶段公平性分解,将整体偏差拆分为三类:工具暴露偏差(工具存在下的子群体效用差异)、工具转换偏差(子群体在工具调用路径上的差异)和模型推理偏差(子群体在信息融合行为上的差异)。在五种主干模型上的实验证明,端到端公平性差距最大达20.79%,且在特定工具条件下子群体效用差距高达50%。中间行为如工具使用、路由模式和推理轨迹均呈现显著子群体差异,这些无法仅通过最终评估发现。结果表明,必须开展过程级公平性审计与去偏,以确保临床智能体系统的公平部署。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Fairness in medical agents is becoming critical as tool-using clinical AI systems orchestrate specialized vision and language modules for tasks such as chest X-ray question answering. While these medical AI agents can improve flexibility, their added pipeline complexity also creates new pathways for demographic bias beyond standalone models. We present DUCK, Decomposing Unfairness in Chest X-ray agents, a systematic audit of fairness in tool-using chest X-ray agents instantiated with MedRAX. To localize where disparities arise, we introduce a stage-wise fairness decomposition that separates end-to-end bias from three agent-specific sources: tool exposure bias, or utility gaps conditioned on tool presence; tool transition bias, or subgroup differences in tool-routing patterns; and model reasoning bias, or subgroup differences in synthesis behaviors. Extensive experiments on tool-using agentic frameworks across five driver backbones reveal that demographic gaps persist in end-to-end performance, with equalized odds up to 20.79% and the lowest fairness-utility tradeoff down to 28.65%. Intermediate behaviors, including tool usage, transition patterns, and reasoning traces, exhibit distinct subgroup disparities that are not predictable from end-to-end evaluation alone. For example, conditioned on segmentation-tool availability, the subgroup utility gap reaches as high as 50%. Our findings underscore the need for process-level fairness auditing and debiasing to ensure the equitable deployment of clinical agentic systems. Code: https://github.com/Nanboy-Ronan/DUCK.
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