Ensuring fairness in machine learning models is a critical challenge. Existing debiasing methods often compromise performance, rely on static correction strategies, and struggle with data sparsity, particularly within minority groups. Furthermore, their utilization of sensitive attributes is often suboptimal, either depending excessively on complete attribute labeling or disregarding these attributes entirely. To overcome these limitations, we propose FairNet, a novel framework for dynamic, instance-level fairness correction. FairNet integrates a bias detector with conditional low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which enables selective activation of the fairness correction mechanism exclusively for instances identified as biased, and thereby preserve performance on unbiased instances. A key contribution is a new contrastive loss function for training the LoRA module, specifically designed to minimize intra-class representation disparities across different sensitive groups and effectively address underfitting in minority groups. The FairNet framework can flexibly handle scenarios with complete, partial, or entirely absent sensitive attribute labels. Theoretical analysis confirms that, under moderate TPR/FPR for the bias detector, FairNet can enhance the performance of the worst group without diminishing overall model performance, and potentially yield slight performance improvements.

Ensuring fairness in machine learning models is a critical challenge. Existing debiasing methods often compromise performance, rely on static correction strategies, and struggle with data sparsity, particularly within minority groups. Furthermore, their utilization of sensitive attributes is often suboptimal, either depending excessively on complete attribute labeling or disregarding these attributes entirely. To overcome these limitations, we propose FairNet, a novel framework for dynamic, instance-level fairness correction. FairNet integrates a bias detector with conditional low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which enables selective activation of the fairness correction mechanism exclusively for instances identified as biased, and thereby preserve performance on unbiased instances. A key contribution is a new contrastive loss function for training the LoRA module, specifically designed to minimize intra-class representation disparities across different sensitive groups and effectively address underfitting in minority groups. The FairNet framework can flexibly handle scenarios with complete, partial, or entirely absent sensitive attribute labels. Theoretical analysis confirms that, under moderate TPR/FPR for the bias detector, FairNet can enhance the performance of the worst group without diminishing overall model performance, and potentially yield slight performance improvements. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across diverse vision and language benchmarks validate the effectiveness of FairNet.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in areas that significantly impact human lives, concerns about fairness and transparency have grown, especially regarding their impact on protected groups. Recently, the intersection of explainability and fairness has emerged as an important area to promote responsible AI systems. This paper explores how explainability methods can be leveraged to detect and interpret unfairness. We propose a pipeline that integrates local post-hoc explanation methods to derive fairness-related insights. During the pipeline design, we identify and address critical questions arising from the use of explanations as bias detectors such as the relationship between distributive and procedural fairness, the effect of removing the protected attribute, the consistency and quality of results across different explanation methods, the impact of various aggregation strategies of local explanations on group fairness evaluations, and the overall trustworthiness of explanations as bias detectors. Our results show the potential of explanation methods used for fairness while highlighting the need to carefully consider the aforementioned critical aspects.

Advancements in retrieving accessible information have evolved faster in the last few years compared to the decades since the internet's creation. Search engines, like Google, have been the number one way to find relevant data. They have always relied on the user's abilities to find the best information in its billions of links and sources at everybody's fingertips. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has completely transformed the field of information retrieval. The LLMs excel not only at retrieving relevant knowledge but also at summarizing it effectively, making information more accessible and consumable for users. On top of it, the rise of AI Agents has introduced another aspect to information retrieval i.e. dynamic information retrieval which enables the integration of real-time data such as weather forecasts, and financial data with the knowledge base to curate context-aware knowledge. However, despite these advancements the agents remain susceptible to issues of bias and fairness, challenges deeply rooted within the knowledge base and training of LLMs. This study introduces a novel approach to bias-aware knowledge retrieval by leveraging agentic framework and the innovative use of bias detectors as tools to identify and highlight inherent biases in the retrieved content. By empowering users with transparency and awareness, this approach aims to foster more equitable information systems and promote the development of responsible AI.

Models trained on real-world data often mirror and exacerbate existing social biases. Traditional methods for mitigating these biases typically require prior knowledge of the specific biases to be addressed, such as gender or racial biases, and the social groups associated with each instance. In this paper, we introduce a novel adversarial training strategy that operates independently of prior bias-type knowledge and protected attribute labels. Our approach proactively identifies biases during model training by utilizing auxiliary models, which are trained concurrently by predicting the performance of the main model without relying on task labels. Additionally, we implement these auxiliary models at various levels of the feature maps of the main model, enabling the detection of a broader and more nuanced range of bias features. Through experiments on racial and gender biases in sentiment and occupation classification tasks, our method effectively reduces social biases without the need for demographic annotations. Moreover, our approach not only matches but often surpasses the efficacy of methods that require detailed demographic insights, marking a significant advancement in bias mitigation techniques.

Whereas previous post-processing approaches for increasing the fairness of predictions of biased classifiers address only group fairness, we propose a method for increasing both individual and group fairness. Our novel framework includes an individual bias detector used to prioritize data samples in a bias mitigation algorithm aiming to improve the group fairness measure of disparate impact. We show superior performance to previous work in the combination of classification accuracy, individual fairness and group fairness on several real-world datasets in applications such as credit, employment, and criminal justice.