Resampled Datasets Are Not Enough: Mitigating Societal Bias Beyond Single Attributes

We tackle societal bias in image-text datasets by removing spurious correlations between protected groups and image attributes. Traditional methods only target labeled attributes, ignoring biases from unlabeled ones. Using text-guided inpainting models, our approach ensures protected group independence from all attributes and mitigates inpainting biases through data filtering. Evaluations on multi-label image classification and image captioning tasks show our method effectively reduces bias without compromising performance across various models.

Yusuke Hirota, Jerone T. A. Andrews, Dora Zhao, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Apostolos Modas, Yuta Nakashima, Alice Xiang · 2024