让医疗视觉语言模型更公平,减少不同人群的诊断差异。
FairLLaVA: Fairness-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Vision-Language Assistants
- 通过最小化属性间互信息,让模型对不同人群表现一致
- 在胸部X光和皮肤镜图像任务中显著降低群体差异
- 轻量级插件式设计,适合临床场景快速部署
尽管在图像引导生成方面表现强大,多模态大语言模型(MLLMs)在不同人口群体间可能呈现不均衡性能,凸显公平性风险。在安全关键的临床环境中,这种差异可能导致诊断叙述不均,削弱对AI辅助决策的信任。尽管公平性在纯视觉和纯语言模型中已有广泛研究,但其对MLLM的影响仍基本未被探索。为此,我们提出FairLLaVA,一种参数高效的微调方法,可在不牺牲整体性能的前提下缓解视觉指令微调中的群体差异。该方法通过最小化目标属性间的互信息,使模型表示具有人口统计不变性。该方法可作为轻量级插件集成,采用低秩适配器微调,提供与架构无关的公平视觉指令遵循方案。在大规模胸部X光报告生成和皮肤镜视觉问答基准上的大量实验表明,FairLLaVA能持续降低群体间差异,同时提升跨多种医学影像模态的公平性加权临床性能与自然语言生成质量。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While powerful in image-conditioned generation, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can display uneven performance across demographic groups, highlighting fairness risks. In safety-critical clinical settings, such disparities risk producing unequal diagnostic narratives and eroding trust in AI-assisted decision-making. While fairness has been studied extensively in vision-only and language-only models, its impact on MLLMs remains largely underexplored. To address these biases, we introduce FairLLaVA, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that mitigates group disparities in visual instruction tuning without compromising overall performance. By minimizing the mutual information between target attributes, FairLLaVA regularizes the model's representations to be demographic-invariant. The method can be incorporated as a lightweight plug-in, maintaining efficiency with low-rank adapter fine-tuning, and provides an architecture-agnostic approach to fair visual instruction following. Extensive experiments on large-scale chest radiology report generation and dermoscopy visual question answering benchmarks show that FairLLaVA consistently reduces inter-group disparities while improving both equity-scaled clinical performance and natural language generation quality across diverse medical imaging modalities. Code can be accessed at https://github.com/bhosalems/FairLLaVA.
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