提出新方法消除自监督学习中的偏见,让模型更公平地提取特征。
Unbiased Open World Regularization for Fair Self-Supervised Learning

- 通过条件分布匹配替代全局约束,避免无关特征干扰表示空间
- 在CelebA上降低平等机会违规,分类准确率优于现有方法
- 适用于微结构与宏观结构纠缠的复杂场景,防止子群体特征坍塌
尽管自监督学习(SSL)和联合嵌入预测架构(JEPAs)取得进展,但其仍易受数据集中的虚假偏见影响。现有正则化方法通过强制全局目标分布(如多元高斯或球面均匀分布)防止表征坍缩,但无法阻止任务无关特征导致的潜在空间分割。虽然近期方法如EnD和FSCL在经验上缓解偏见,但我们证明它们仅部分逼近条件分布匹配。为此,本文提出无偏开放世界正则化(UOWReg),一种仅需编码器的框架,将目标从全局转向条件分布,确保学习表征与目标属性统计独立,无论选择何种目标分布。我们在高斯和球面潜空间上验证该框架,通过统计度量实现目标分布。结果显示,球面上的条件均匀性可进一步降低线性探测分类误差。实证表明,UOWReg在CelebA基准上显著减少平等机会违规,同时保持竞争力分类性能。此外,我们引入合成雕刻任务——一个宏观结构掩盖微观签名的新设定。实验显示,UOWReg有效防止标准SSL中的子群体坍塌,即使微观签名被强烈纠缠,仍能成功分离。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Despite recent advances, self-supervised learning (SSL) models and Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) remain susceptible to learning spurious biases in the dataset. These techniques rely on regularization, which prevents representation collapse by enforcing a global target distribution such as a multivariate Gaussian or a uniform distribution on the sphere. However, these global constraints are insufficient to prevent bias entanglement, as task-irrelevant features can still segregate the latent space into distinct sub-regions. While recent approaches like Entangling and Disentangling (EnD) and Fair Supervised Contrastive Learning (FSCL) empirically debias the latent space, we show that they act as partial approximations of conditional distribution matching. To enforce this matching explicitly, we propose Unbiased Open World Regularization (UOWReg), an encoder-only framework. We show that this shift from a global to a conditional objective guarantees statistical independence between the learned representations and the targeted attributes, regardless of the chosen target distribution. We empirically validate this framework across both Gaussian and spherical latent spaces, using statistical measures to enforce these target distributions. While conditional matching successfully mitigates bias with both distributions, we demonstrate that enforcing conditional uniformity on the sphere yields a lower linearprobing classification error. Empirically, UOWReg reduces Equalized Odds violations on the CelebA benchmark while maintaining competitive classification accuracy compared to existing encoder-only baselines. Furthermore, we introduce the Synthetic Engraving Task-a novel setting in which a dominant macro-structure masks a fine-grained micro-signature. We show that UOWReg effectively prevents the subpopulation collapse observed in standard SSL, successfully isolating micro-signatures even when heavily entangled with the global structure.
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