无需标注数据,通过梯度分析发现模型隐藏偏见
Bias Leaves a Gradient Trail: Label-Free Bias Identification via Gradient Probes on Concept Decompositions

- 用非负矩阵分解提取激活特征中的可解释概念向量
- 通过误分类样本梯度反传判断概念是否为虚假关联线索
- 适用于已部署模型,可直接提升最差群体准确率
视觉分类器可能利用虚假相关性,在分布内表现良好但面对分布外时失效。现有方法常依赖标注数据、虚假属性标签或重训练,难以在模型部署后使用或未知偏见时应用。本文提出一种无需标签的后验偏见识别方法,仅需保留的审计数据中的标准类别标签。对每个目标类别,收集被预测为该类的输入图像块,对中间激活进行非负矩阵分解,得到一组可解释的概念向量。候选概念通过其与误分类样本反向传播梯度的交互作用进行偏见评分:具有偏见的概念在纠正假负时被激活,纠正假正时被抑制。在彩色MNIST和Waterbirds上,该方法成功识别出已知的虚假线索;在CelebA上发现了与标注性别属性部分重合但更全面的决策方向。推理时抑制排名最高的概念,可在不重训练、不更新参数的情况下,使Waterbirds的最差组准确率提升最多17.9个百分点,CelebA提升10.4个百分点。本方法可发现不完全对应标注的决策相关虚假方向,为冻结视觉模型提供可解释的审计工具与可操作的去偏手段。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Vision classifiers can exploit spurious correlations, achieving high in-distribution accuracy yet failing under distribution shift. Existing approaches to bias mitigation and analysis often depend on curated datasets, spurious-attribute or group labels, or retraining, which may be infeasible once a model is deployed or the relevant bias is unknown. We present a bias-label-free, post-hoc method for identifying spurious concepts in frozen vision models, relying only on standard class labels from a held-out audit dataset. For each target class, we collect patches from inputs predicted as that class and apply non-negative matrix factorization to intermediate activations to obtain a bank of interpretable concept vectors. Candidate concepts are then ranked with a bias estimator derived from their interaction with backpropagated gradients on misclassified examples: bias concepts tend to get activated when correcting false negatives and suppressed when correcting false positives. On Colored MNIST and Waterbirds the method recovers concepts aligned with the known spurious cue, and on CelebA it surfaces decision-relevant directions that only partially coincide with the annotated gender attribute; suppressing the top-ranked concepts at inference time improves worst-group accuracy by up to 17.9 percentage points on Waterbirds and 10.4 on CelebA without any retraining or parameter updates. Our method identifies decision-relevant spurious directions that need not coincide with annotated ones, providing both an interpretable auditing tool and an actionable debiasing handle for frozen vision models. Code is available at https://github.com/vitryt/label-free-bias-identification.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。