BMFT: Achieving Fairness via Bias-based Weight Masking Fine-tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Xue, Yuyang, Yan, Junyu, Dutt, Raman, Haider, Fasih, Liu, Jingshuai, McDonagh, Steven, Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Xue, Yuyang
Yan, Junyu
Dutt, Raman
Haider, Fasih
Liu, Jingshuai
McDonagh, Steven
Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
author_facet Xue, Yuyang
Yan, Junyu
Dutt, Raman
Haider, Fasih
Liu, Jingshuai
McDonagh, Steven
Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
contents Developing models with robust group fairness properties is paramount, particularly in ethically sensitive domains such as medical diagnosis. Recent approaches to achieving fairness in machine learning require a substantial amount of training data and depend on model retraining, which may not be practical in real-world scenarios. To mitigate these challenges, we propose Bias-based Weight Masking Fine-Tuning (BMFT), a novel post-processing method that enhances the fairness of a trained model in significantly fewer epochs without requiring access to the original training data. BMFT produces a mask over model parameters, which efficiently identifies the weights contributing the most towards biased predictions. Furthermore, we propose a two-step debiasing strategy, wherein the feature extractor undergoes initial fine-tuning on the identified bias-influenced weights, succeeded by a fine-tuning phase on a reinitialised classification layer to uphold discriminative performance. Extensive experiments across four dermatological datasets and two sensitive attributes demonstrate that BMFT outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques in both diagnostic accuracy and fairness metrics. Our findings underscore the efficacy and robustness of BMFT in advancing fairness across various out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/vios-s/BMFT
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_06890
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BMFT: Achieving Fairness via Bias-based Weight Masking Fine-tuning
Xue, Yuyang
Yan, Junyu
Dutt, Raman
Haider, Fasih
Liu, Jingshuai
McDonagh, Steven
Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Developing models with robust group fairness properties is paramount, particularly in ethically sensitive domains such as medical diagnosis. Recent approaches to achieving fairness in machine learning require a substantial amount of training data and depend on model retraining, which may not be practical in real-world scenarios. To mitigate these challenges, we propose Bias-based Weight Masking Fine-Tuning (BMFT), a novel post-processing method that enhances the fairness of a trained model in significantly fewer epochs without requiring access to the original training data. BMFT produces a mask over model parameters, which efficiently identifies the weights contributing the most towards biased predictions. Furthermore, we propose a two-step debiasing strategy, wherein the feature extractor undergoes initial fine-tuning on the identified bias-influenced weights, succeeded by a fine-tuning phase on a reinitialised classification layer to uphold discriminative performance. Extensive experiments across four dermatological datasets and two sensitive attributes demonstrate that BMFT outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques in both diagnostic accuracy and fairness metrics. Our findings underscore the efficacy and robustness of BMFT in advancing fairness across various out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/vios-s/BMFT
title BMFT: Achieving Fairness via Bias-based Weight Masking Fine-tuning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06890