Mitigating attribute amplification in counterfactual image generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xia, Tian, Roschewitz, Mélanie, Ribeiro, Fabio De Sousa, Jones, Charles, Glocker, Ben
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Xia, Tian
Roschewitz, Mélanie
Ribeiro, Fabio De Sousa
Jones, Charles
Glocker, Ben
author_facet Xia, Tian
Roschewitz, Mélanie
Ribeiro, Fabio De Sousa
Jones, Charles
Glocker, Ben
contents Causal generative modelling is gaining interest in medical imaging due to its ability to answer interventional and counterfactual queries. Most work focuses on generating counterfactual images that look plausible, using auxiliary classifiers to enforce effectiveness of simulated interventions. We investigate pitfalls in this approach, discovering the issue of attribute amplification, where unrelated attributes are spuriously affected during interventions, leading to biases across protected characteristics and disease status. We show that attribute amplification is caused by the use of hard labels in the counterfactual training process and propose soft counterfactual fine-tuning to mitigate this issue. Our method substantially reduces the amplification effect while maintaining effectiveness of generated images, demonstrated on a large chest X-ray dataset. Our work makes an important advancement towards more faithful and unbiased causal modelling in medical imaging.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_09422
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating attribute amplification in counterfactual image generation
Xia, Tian
Roschewitz, Mélanie
Ribeiro, Fabio De Sousa
Jones, Charles
Glocker, Ben
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Causal generative modelling is gaining interest in medical imaging due to its ability to answer interventional and counterfactual queries. Most work focuses on generating counterfactual images that look plausible, using auxiliary classifiers to enforce effectiveness of simulated interventions. We investigate pitfalls in this approach, discovering the issue of attribute amplification, where unrelated attributes are spuriously affected during interventions, leading to biases across protected characteristics and disease status. We show that attribute amplification is caused by the use of hard labels in the counterfactual training process and propose soft counterfactual fine-tuning to mitigate this issue. Our method substantially reduces the amplification effect while maintaining effectiveness of generated images, demonstrated on a large chest X-ray dataset. Our work makes an important advancement towards more faithful and unbiased causal modelling in medical imaging.
title Mitigating attribute amplification in counterfactual image generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09422