arXiv:2606. 03214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this study, we evaluate the performance of skin lesion classification using ResNet-based convolutional models, focusing on the impact of demographic bias in training data, particularly variations in patient sex and age.
arXiv:2607. 14984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-subgroup fairness audits of medical image classifiers face a sample-size problem: minority subgroups in held-out test sets have so few samples that the resulting confidence intervals on per-subgroup performance are wider than the bias the audit is meant to detect.
The paper evaluates how well generalist and dermatology-specific machine learning models perform on diverse skin lesion datasets, including dermoscopic images and smartphone photographs. It benchmarks a range of architectures—general-purpose vision-language models, foundation models, and task-specific dermatology classifiers—under conditions of distribution shift, modality change, and demographic variability. The study quantifies the performance gap between current state‑of‑the‑art models and the robustness needed for safe, equitable clinical deployment.
The study examines why dermatology AI models, largely trained on light‑skinned, cancer‑focused images, perform poorly when applied to diverse patient populations. By comparing a cancer‑trained baseline, two dermatology foundation models, and a general‑purpose vision model on tone‑stratified and disease‑shifted datasets, the authors find that disease‑distribution shift, rather than skin‑tone underrepresentation, is the primary cause of generalization failure. Representation analysis shows that cancer‑specialized features lack transferable structure, while dermatology‑pretrained features maintain stronger clustering, and lightweight adaptation with about ten labeled examples per category can recover most performance.
arXiv:2606. 31704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The deployment of face detection models in real-world applications raises important fairness concerns, as these systems may showcase performance disparities across demographic groups.
arXiv:2609.36400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning classifiers for dermoscopic skin lesions often reach high in-distribution accuracy while quietly relying on spurious background cues su...
arXiv:2606. 20461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models have been shown to exhibit discriminatory outcomes or degraded performance for individuals at the intersection of multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender.
Accurate dermatological diagnosis naturally necessitates equitable performance across diverse populations, yet a systematic lack of expertly annotated images, especially for underrepresented skin tones and rare diseases, impedes progress toward measurably fair methods. We introduce cgDDI (Controllable Generation of Diverse Dermatological Imagery), a hybrid framework that (1) synthesizes realistic healthy skin samples without disturbing other input properties, (2) maps single-sample rare lesions onto novel skin-tones and locations non-parametrically, and (3) allows for efficient parametric generation with as few as 10 training samples.
The study examines how three parameter‑efficient adaptation methods—linear heads on the raw CLS token, an MLP, and an attention‑pooling module—affect pathology classification accuracy and subgroup fairness when applied to a frozen Rad‑DINO chest X‑ray encoder. Using the MIMIC‑CXR dataset, the authors evaluate eight pathologies across race, sex, and imaging‑view subgroups, finding that attention pooling yields the best overall performance and encodes protected attributes most strongly, yet higher performance does not consistently reduce subgroup disparities. The results show that attribute encoding strength and layer choice do not reliably predict fairness outcomes, indicating that fairness must be assessed directly for each task.
arXiv:2607. 09891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfake detection models determine whether speech is genuine or artificially generated, but high overall accuracy can mask substantial performance disparities across demographic groups.
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.
The study audits four image aesthetic scorers—LAION-Aesthetics, PickScore, ImageReward, and HPSv2—using pixel‑level interventions on skin tone and body type in both synthetic and real images. It finds that most scorers exhibit a fidelity preference: unaltered images receive the highest scores, while perturbations in either direction are penalized in an inverted‑U pattern, and this effect is largely independent of the skin operator. Synthetic‑only audits are misleading, as the apparent preference for darker skin in synthetic faces reverses or weakens when evaluated on real faces, and cross‑scorer results vary widely, underscoring the need for real‑data, within‑image causal isolation to accurately assess demographic bias.
arXiv:2607. 28936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Facial biometric identification relies on the distinctiveness of user attributes within a high-dimensional embedding space.