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

AbstractWe 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. Specifically, we achieve an average societal bias reduction of 46.1% in leakage-based bias metrics for multi-label classification and 74.8% for image captioning.