arXiv:2607.05574cs.CYcs.AI2026-07

AI偏见研究高度集中,可能影响全球公平性评估的普适性。

Whose fairness? Structural concentration in AI bias research

论文配图:Whose fairness? Structural concentration in AI bias research
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 分析692篇论文,发现研究被少数国家和机构主导。
  • 美国主导发表与合作,低收入国家几乎缺席,引用极不均衡。
  • 基础领域集中度高,可能导致偏见缓解方法无法跨场景通用。

人工智能日益介入医疗、法律和公共服务等关键决策,相关领域发展出大量测量与缓解偏见的方法。然而,这些方法所依赖的公平性定义、基准测试和去偏框架被当作普适标准,其背后的研究群体构成从未被系统刻画。我们分析了涵盖五个主题领域的692篇论文,结合文献计量与语义聚类,发现研究活动高度集中在少数国家、机构和作者,美国在所有领域均领先,尤其在通用公平性与去偏领域(最大、最常被引的领域)表现突出,且覆盖全部四个语义集群。低收入和中等收入国家在该社区及其合作网络中几乎缺席,引用分布极度倾斜(中位数=9,均值=93.5),少数论文主导话语权。由于通用公平性领域提供应用领域所采用的定义与基准,该基础领域的集中性会整体传播至整个AI偏见研究——引发担忧:在有限背景下开发并验证的缓解方法可能无法适用于所有部署场景与人群。本文提供一个交互式地图以持续监测该领域的结构演变。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Artificial intelligence increasingly mediates consequential decisions in healthcare, law, and public services, and the field has responded with an extensive methodology for measuring and mitigating bias. Yet the fairness definitions, benchmarks, and debiasing frameworks on which this methodology rests are treated as universal while being produced by a research community whose composition has never been characterized. We show that the AI bias research are structurally concentrated, and that this concentration is greatest, geographically, in precisely the domain the rest of the field inherits from. Analyzing 692 publications spanning five thematic domains, combining bibliometric analysis with semantic clustering, we find that research activity is dominated by a small set of countries, institutions, and authors, with the United States leading publication output and collaboration networks across every domain and most strongly in general fairness and bias mitigation, the largest, most-cited domain with meaningful representation across all four semantic clusters. Low- and middle-income countries remain largely absent from the community and its collaboration networks, and citation influence is highly skewed (median = 9; mean =93.5 ), indicating that a small fraction of publications disproportionately shapes the field. Because the general-fairness domain supplies the definitions and benchmarks that application areas apply, concentration of research effort in this foundational domain propagates across AI bias research as a whole - raising the concern that mitigation methods developed and validated within a narrow set of contexts may not generalize to all populations and settings where AI is deployed. We provide an interactive atlas for continuous monitoring of the field's structure.

AI偏见研究集中公平性文献计量

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。