Looking at Model Debiasing through the Lens of Anomaly Detection

Vito Paolo Pastore, Massimiliano Ciranni, Davide Marinelli, Francesca Odone, Vittorio Murino; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 2548-2557

Deep neural networks are likely to learn unintended spurious correlations between training data and labels when dealing with biased data potentially limiting the generalization to unseen samples not presenting the same bias. In this context model debiasing approaches can be devised aiming at reducing the model's dependency on such unwanted correlations either leveraging the knowledge of bias information or not. In this work we focus on the latter and more realistic scenario showing the importance of accurately predicting the bias-conflicting and bias-aligned samples to obtain compelling performance in bias mitigation. On this ground we propose to conceive the problem of model bias from an out-of-distribution perspective introducing a new bias identification method based on anomaly detection. We claim that when data is mostly biased bias-conflicting samples can be regarded as outliers with respect to the bias-aligned distribution in the feature space of a biased model thus allowing for precisely detecting them with an anomaly detection method. Coupling the proposed bias identification approach with bias-conflicting data upsampling and augmentation in a two-step strategy we reach state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real benchmark datasets. Ultimately our proposed approach shows that the data bias issue does not necessarily require complex debiasing methods given that an accurate bias identification procedure is defined. Source code is available at https://github.com/Malga-Vision/MoDAD