arXiv Machine Learning

Reweighting is not Harmless: Understanding the Role of Dataset Characteristics

Reweighting, a common pre‑processing technique used to promote fairness by assigning different weights to data points, can unintentionally worsen fairness under certain data conditions. Controlled simulations varying group size and event prevalence show that reweighting may reduce underestimation for one group while increasing it for another, especially when the higher‑prevalence group is a minority. These effects occur across multiple classifiers and are not reflected in overall accuracy, making them hard to detect without detailed subgroup analysis.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Let's Unlearn Stereotypes Before Decision-Making: Assessing the Impact of Intrinsic Bias Mitigation on Downstream Fairness in LLMs

arXiv:2509. 16462v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes decision-making systems, where biased predictions can reinforce social and economic disparities.

By Mina Arzaghi, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Florian Carichon, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Plante, Golnoosh Farnadi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 9

FairSelect: A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Level and Intersectional Algorithmic Fairness

Algorithmic fairness methods are increasingly used to identify and mitigate bias in machine learning models, yet most approaches are evaluated in isolation and along single demographic axes. This limits practical guidance for selecting fairness strategies, where disparities may arise across intersectional subgroups and across multiple stages of the modeling lifecycle.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

FRAME: separating sampling variation from representational cause in medical imaging fairness

The paper introduces FRAME, a two‑step framework for auditing fairness claims in medical imaging. First, it derives a fair‑model reference distribution that captures the portion of subgroup performance differences attributable to sampling variation. Second, it tests the remaining difference using operators in representation space to assess whether demographic information or disease entanglement drives the bias. Across a large dataset of 702,206 images and 36 encoders, the reference explains a substantial median share of race and age differences, while interventions such as injecting demographic decodability or entangling disease direction have limited impact on the residual bias.

By Mahshad Lotfinia, Daniel Truhn, Andreas Maier, Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

When Does Synthetic Data Augmentation Improve Score-Based Imbalanced Classification?

Synthetic data augmentation is widely used to mitigate class imbalance, but its theoretical effects on score-based classification remain poorly understood. This paper develops a framework for characterizing when synthetic minority augmentation can improve threshold-integrated and threshold-optimized metrics, including AUROC, AUPRC, best-threshold balanced accuracy, and best-threshold \(\F_1\) score.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

When Post-Processing Fairness Constraints Help and When They Harm: Evidence from Eight Cross-Domain Evaluations

The paper introduces FAPE, a four‑stage framework for evaluating the post‑processing fairness intervention ThresholdOptimizer across eight diverse domains, including criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and education. It reports that the intervention reduces disparity in most high‑disparity cases but can worsen fairness when baseline disparities are low, and that a single deployment‑time audit is unreliable without continuous monitoring and baseline‑disparity screening.

By Nithin Raghava Ramachandra Narla