Equalized Generative Treatment: Matching f-divergences for Fairness in Generative Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Verine, Alexandre, Pinot, Rafael, Bronnec, Florian Le
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Verine, Alexandre
Pinot, Rafael
Bronnec, Florian Le
author_facet Verine, Alexandre
Pinot, Rafael
Bronnec, Florian Le
contents Fairness is a crucial concern for generative models, which not only reflect but can also amplify societal and cultural biases. Existing fairness notions for generative models are largely adapted from classification and focus on balancing the probability of generating samples from each sensitive group. We show that such criteria are brittle, as they can be met even when different sensitive groups are modeled with widely varying quality. To address this limitation, we introduce a new fairness definition for generative models, termed as equalized generative treatment (EGT), which requires comparable generation quality across all sensitive groups, with quality measured via a reference f-divergence. We further analyze the trade-offs induced by EGT, demonstrating that enforcing fairness constraints necessarily couples the overall model quality to that of the most challenging group to approximate. This indicates that a simple yet efficient min-max fine-tuning method should be able to balance f-divergences across sensitive groups to satisfy EGT. We validate this theoretical insight through a set of experiments on both image and text generation tasks. We demonstrate that min-max methods consistently achieve fairer outcomes compared to other approaches from the literature, while maintaining competitive overall performance for both tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Equalized Generative Treatment: Matching f-divergences for Fairness in Generative Models
Verine, Alexandre
Pinot, Rafael
Bronnec, Florian Le
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Fairness is a crucial concern for generative models, which not only reflect but can also amplify societal and cultural biases. Existing fairness notions for generative models are largely adapted from classification and focus on balancing the probability of generating samples from each sensitive group. We show that such criteria are brittle, as they can be met even when different sensitive groups are modeled with widely varying quality. To address this limitation, we introduce a new fairness definition for generative models, termed as equalized generative treatment (EGT), which requires comparable generation quality across all sensitive groups, with quality measured via a reference f-divergence. We further analyze the trade-offs induced by EGT, demonstrating that enforcing fairness constraints necessarily couples the overall model quality to that of the most challenging group to approximate. This indicates that a simple yet efficient min-max fine-tuning method should be able to balance f-divergences across sensitive groups to satisfy EGT. We validate this theoretical insight through a set of experiments on both image and text generation tasks. We demonstrate that min-max methods consistently achieve fairer outcomes compared to other approaches from the literature, while maintaining competitive overall performance for both tasks.
title Equalized Generative Treatment: Matching f-divergences for Fairness in Generative Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08660