arXiv:2607.06603cs.CVcs.AI2026-07NeurIPS被引 7

图像分类中反事实公平不保证群体公平,新数据集揭示其根本原因。

Do Counterfactually Fair Image Classifiers Satisfy Group Fairness? -- A Theoretical and Empirical Study

论文配图:Do Counterfactually Fair Image Classifiers Satisfy Group Fairness? -- A Theoretical and Empirical Study
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 构建新图像数据集,实现反事实与群体公平的同步评估。
  • 发现反事实公平模型在图像任务中未必满足群体公平性。
  • 提出简单有效方法缓解潜在属性干扰,提升公平性表现。

算法公平性研究涵盖反事实公平(CF)和群体公平(GF)等多个维度,但二者关系在图像分类任务中仍不明确,主要因难以获取敏感属性的反事实样本(如同一人不同第二性征的图像)。本文利用高质量图像编辑技术构建新数据集 extit{oursCeleb} 与 extit{oursLFW},基于主流群体公平基准,可同时评估 CF 与 GF。实验表明,图像分类中 CF 并不蕴含 GF,与表格数据中的结论相反。理论分析指出,这可能源于一个与敏感属性相关但非其因果因素的潜在属性 $G$(如第二性征与发长高度相关)。为此,提出反事实知识蒸馏(CKD)基线方法,有效降低对 $G$ 的依赖。大量实验证明,当成功减少对 $G$ 的依赖时,达到反事实公平的模型也能满足群体公平性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The notion of algorithmic fairness has been actively explored from various aspects of fairness, such as counterfactual fairness (CF) and group fairness (GF). However, the exact relationship between CF and GF remains to be unclear, especially in image classification tasks; the reason is because we often cannot collect counterfactual samples regarding a sensitive attribute, essential for evaluating CF, from the existing images (\eg, a photo of the same person but with different secondary sex characteristics). In this paper, we construct new image datasets for evaluating CF by using a high-quality image editing method and carefully labeling with human annotators. Our datasets, \oursceleb and \ourslfw, build upon the popular image GF benchmarks; hence, we can evaluate CF and GF simultaneously. We empirically observe that CF does not imply GF in image classification, whereas previous studies on tabular datasets observed the opposite. We theoretically show that it could be due to the existence of a latent attribute $G$ that is correlated with, but not caused by, the sensitive attribute (\eg, secondary sex characteristics are highly correlated with hair length). From this observation, we propose a simple baseline, Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation (CKD), to mitigate such correlation with the sensitive attributes. Extensive experimental results on \oursceleb and \ourslfw demonstrate that CF-achieving models satisfy GF if we successfully reduce the reliance on $G$ (\eg, using CKD).

公平性图像分类反事实群体公平

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