Debiasing Classifiers by Amplifying Bias with Latent Diffusion and Large Language Models

Neural networks struggle with image classification when biases are learned and misleads correlations, affecting their generalization and performance. Previous methods require attribute labels (e.g. background, color) or utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to mitigate biases. We introduce DiffuBias, a novel pipeline for text-to-image generation that enhances classifier robustness by generating bias-conflict samples, without requiring training during the generation phase. Utilizing pretrained diffusion and image captioning models, DiffuBias generates images that challenge the biases of classifiers, using the top-$K$ losses from a biased classifier ($f_B$) to create more representative data samples. This method not only debiases effectively but also boosts classifier generalization capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, DiffuBias is the first approach leveraging a stable diffusion model to generate bias-conflict samples in debiasing tasks. Our comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that DiffuBias achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. We also conduct a comparative analysis of various generative models in terms of carbon emissions and energy consumption to highlight the significance of computational efficiency.

DiffInject: Revisiting Debias via Synthetic Data Generation using Diffusion-based Style Injection

Dataset bias is a significant challenge in machine learning, where specific attributes, such as texture or color of the images are unintentionally learned resulting in detrimental performance. To address this, previous efforts have focused on debiasing models either by developing novel debiasing algorithms or by generating synthetic data to mitigate the prevalent dataset biases. However, generative approaches to date have largely relied on using bias-specific samples from the dataset, which are typically too scarce. In this work, we propose, DiffInject, a straightforward yet powerful method to augment synthetic bias-conflict samples using a pretrained diffusion model. This approach significantly advances the use of diffusion models for debiasing purposes by manipulating the latent space. Our framework does not require any explicit knowledge of the bias types or labelling, making it a fully unsupervised setting for debiasing. Our methodology demonstrates substantial result in effectively reducing dataset bias.