提升医学影像分割公平性,同时关注组内差异与组间差异。
DuetFair: Coupling Inter- and Intra-Subgroup Robustness for Fair Medical Image Segmentation

- 双轴框架兼顾组间适应与组内鲁棒性,解决组内隐藏失败问题。
- 在多个数据集上显著提升最差子组的分割性能,最高增益达7.4%。
- 适合关注医疗模型公平性、尤其是复杂分组场景的研究者。
医学图像分割模型在不同子群体间表现不均。现有公平性方法多聚焦于提升子群体平均性能,隐含假设每个子群体内部同质化,但会掩盖子群体内的困难样本,导致高损失案例被平均值遮蔽,我们称之为‘组内隐藏失败’。为此,本文提出DuetFair机制——一种双轴公平性框架,同时考虑组间适应与组内鲁棒性。基于此,我们设计FairDRO,结合分布感知专家混合(dMoE)与子群体条件分布鲁棒优化(DRO)损失聚合。该设计使模型既能跨子群体自适应,又能降低各子群体内部的隐藏失败。我们在三个具有不同程度组内异质性的医学图像分割基准上评估了FairDRO。在Harvard-FairSeg上取得最优公平性加权性能,在HAM10000上无论按年龄或种族分组,均提升最差子组表现。在3D放疗靶区队列中,相比最强基线,肿瘤分期分组下最差组Dice提升3.5点(↑6.0%),机构分组下提升4.1点(↑7.4%)。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Medical image segmentation models can perform unevenly across subgroups. Most existing fairness methods focus on improving average subgroup performance, implicitly treating each subgroup as internally homogeneous. However, this can hide difficult cases within a subgroup, where high-loss samples are obscured by the subgroup mean. We call this problem \textbf{intra-group hidden failure}. To solve this, we propose \textbf{DuetFair} mechanism, a dual-axis fairness framework that jointly considers inter-subgroup adaptation and intra-subgroup robustness. Based on DuetFair, we introduce \textbf{FairDRO}, which combines distribution-aware mixture-of-experts (dMoE) with subgroup-conditioned distributionally robust optimization (DRO) loss aggregation. This design allows the model to adapt across subgroups while also reducing hidden failures within each subgroup. We evaluate FairDRO on three medical image segmentation benchmarks with varying degrees of within-group heterogeneity. FairDRO achieves the best equity-scaled performance on Harvard-FairSeg and improves worst-case subgroup performance on HAM10000 under both age- and race-based grouping schemes. On the 3D radiotherapy target cohort, FairDRO further improves worst-group Dice by 3.5 points ($\uparrow 6.0\%$) under the tumor-stage grouping and by 4.1 points ($\uparrow 7.4\%$) under the institution grouping over the strongest baseline.
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