arXiv:2608.09669cs.CV2026-08

发现人脸分析中被忽略的隐性脆弱群体,提升公平性评估精度。

CIFA: Contextual-Intersectional Fairness Auditing for Hidden Subgroup Discovery in Face Analysis

  • 构建上下文交叉公平性审计框架,识别种族与光照等多重因素交互影响
  • 在多个数据集上发现聚合准确率高但特定组合下性能严重下降的隐藏子群
  • 适用于需严格公平性验证的人脸识别系统研发与审核人员

计算机视觉中的公平性评估通常依赖整体准确率和人口统计子群分析。然而,视觉模型也对光照、模糊、图像质量、面部配饰和外观属性等上下文因素敏感,这些因素可能与人口特征交互,导致性能显著下降的隐藏子群,即使整体准确率高且人口统计公平性看似可接受。为此,我们提出上下文交叉公平性审计框架(CIFA),系统识别由人口特征与上下文属性交互引发的子群脆弱性。CIFA执行人口、上下文及上下文交叉审计,并通过最差组发现定位并排序最脆弱的属性组合。我们在基于ResNet-50和ViT-B/16的性别分类任务上,使用FairFace、CelebA和UTKFace数据集评估了CIFA。结果表明,整体准确率和仅考虑人口统计的评估会掩盖显著的上下文交叉不公平性。我们进一步通过审计-缓解-再审计流程评估多种现有缓解策略,发现虽部分最差组差异有所降低,但无单一策略能在所有数据集和架构上一致消除这些偏差。研究确立了上下文交叉审计在公平性评估中的关键作用,并提供可复现的框架用于发现、优先处理和重新评估人脸分析系统的隐性风险。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Fairness evaluation in computer vision commonly relies on aggregate accuracy and demographic subgroup analysis. However, visual models are also sensitive to contextual factors such as illumination, blur, image quality, facial accessories, and appearance attributes. These factors may interact with demographic characteristics, producing hidden subgroups in which performance degrades substantially despite strong aggregate accuracy and apparently acceptable demographic fairness. To address this, we propose the Contextual-Intersectional Fairness Auditing Framework (CIFA), a structured framework for identifying subgroup vulnerabilities arising from interactions between demographic and contextual attributes. CIFA performs demographic, contextual, and contextual-intersectional auditing, followed by worst-group discovery to identify and rank the most vulnerable attribute combinations. We evaluate CIFA on gender classification using ResNet-50 \cite{he2016deep} and ViT-B/16 \cite{dosovitskiy2020image} across FairFace \cite{Karkkainen2021}, CelebA \cite{Liu2015}, and UTKFace \cite{Zhang2017}. Our results show that aggregate accuracy and demographic-only evaluation can mask substantial contextual-intersectional disparities. We further assess several established mitigation strategies through an audit--mitigate--reaudit protocol and find that, although some worst-group disparities are reduced, no single strategy consistently eliminates them across datasets and architectures. These findings establish contextual-intersectional auditing as an important component of fairness evaluation and provide a reproducible framework for discovering, prioritizing, and reassessing hidden subgroup risks in face analysis systems.

公平性审计人脸分析隐藏子群多维公平

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