Recent discoveries have revealed that deep neural networks might behave in a
biased manner in many real-world scenarios. For instance, deep networks trained
on a large-scale face recognition dataset CelebA tend to predict blonde hair
for females and black hair for males. Such biases not only jeopardize the
robustness of models but also perpetuate and amplify social biases, which is
especially concerning for automated decision-making processes in healthcare,
recruitment, etc., as they could exacerbate unfair economic and social
inequalities among different groups. Existing debiasing methods suffer from
high costs in bias labeling or model re-training, while also exhibiting a
deficiency in terms of elucidating the origins of biases within the model. To
this respect, we propose a fast model debiasing framework (FMD) which offers an
efficient approach to identify, evaluate and remove biases inherent in trained
models. The FMD identifies biased attributes through an explicit counterfactual
concept and quantifies the influence of data samples with influence functions.
Moreover, we design a machine unlearning-based strategy to efficiently and
effectively remove the bias in a trained model with a small counterfactual
dataset. Experiments on the Colored MNIST, CelebA, and Adult Income datasets
along with experiments with large language models demonstrate that our method
achieves superior or competing accuracies compared with state-of-the-art
methods while attaining significantly fewer biases and requiring much less
debiasing cost. Notably, our method requires only a small external dataset and
updating a minimal amount of model parameters, without the requirement of
access to training data that may be too large or unavailable in practice.

最近的研究发现，深度神经网络在许多实际场景中可能表现出偏见。本研究提出了一种快速模型去偏方法（FMD），该方法通过显式的反事实概念识别偏见属性，并使用影响函数量化数据样本的影响，进而设计了一种基于机器遗忘的策略来高效有效地消除模型中的偏见。实验证明，与现有先进方法相比，我们的方法在达到更高或相当的准确性的同时，具有更少的偏见和更低的去偏成本要求。