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With the rise of AI, algorithms have become better at learning underlying patterns from the training data including ingrained social biases based on gender, race, etc. Deployment of such algorithms to domains such as hiring, healthcare, law enforcement, etc. has raised serious concerns about fairness, accountability, trust and interpretability in machine learning algorithms. To alleviate this problem, we propose D-BIAS, a visual interactive tool that embodies human-in-the-loop AI approach for auditing and mitigating social biases from tabular datasets. It uses a graphical causal model to represent causal relationships among different features in the dataset and as a medium to inject domain knowledge. A user can detect the presence of bias against a group, say females, or a subgroup, say black females, by identifying unfair causal relationships in the causal network and using an array of fairness metrics. Thereafter, the user can mitigate bias by refining the causal model and acting on the unfair causal edges. For each interaction, say weakening/deleting a biased causal edge, the system uses a novel method to simulate a new (debiased) dataset based on the current causal model while ensuring a minimal change from the original dataset. Users can visually assess the impact of their interactions on different fairness metrics, utility metrics, data distortion, and the underlying data distribution. Once satisfied, they can download the debiased dataset and use it for any downstream application for fairer predictions. We evaluate D-BIAS by conducting experiments on 3 datasets and also a formal user study. We found that D-BIAS helps reduce bias significantly compared to the baseline debiasing approach across different fairness metrics while incurring little data distortion and a small loss in utility. Moreover, our human-in-the-loop based approach significantly outperforms an automated approach on trust, interpretability and accountability.
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This content will become publicly available on November 23, 2026
C2BM: Causal Concept Disentanglement for Fair MultimodalCOVID-19 Detection
Algorithmic bias in COVID-19 detection systems poses aserious threat to equitable pandemic response, asdemographicdisparities in model performance risk worsening healthoutcomes across vulnerable populations. We present anadoptedCausal Concept Bottleneck Model (C2BM) framework thatsystematically addresses fairness in multimodal COVID-19detection by learning interpretable concepts from chest CTscans and patient metadata. Our approach targets theCountry → Institution → COVID causal pathway throughprincipledinterventions, achieving substantial bias reduction: age andgender demographic parity differences decrease from 51.15%to 18.50% (64% reduction), gender disparate impact improvesfrom 0.6475 to 0.9812 (51% improvement), whilepreserving 98.45% diagnostic F1-score. Throughcomprehensive evaluation across four model variants, wedemonstrate that causal interventions enable stable andreproduciblefairness improvements without compromising clinicalutility. Our work establishes that principled causalreasoning canachieve practical fairness-accuracy trade-offs in COVID-19detection systems, providing actionable guidance forequitable healthcare AI deployment.
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- PAR ID:
- 10649634
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 2025 AAAI Fall Symposium Series
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2994-4317
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 567 to 575
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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