English

Say My Name: a Model's Bias Discovery Framework

Machine Learning 2025-10-17 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society

Abstract

In the last few years, due to the broad applicability of deep learning to downstream tasks and end-to-end training capabilities, increasingly more concerns about potential biases to specific, non-representative patterns have been raised. Many works focusing on unsupervised debiasing usually leverage the tendency of deep models to learn ``easier'' samples, for example by clustering the latent space to obtain bias pseudo-labels. However, the interpretation of such pseudo-labels is not trivial, especially for a non-expert end user, as it does not provide semantic information about the bias features. To address this issue, we introduce ``Say My Name'' (SaMyNa), the first tool to identify biases within deep models semantically. Unlike existing methods, our approach focuses on biases learned by the model. Our text-based pipeline enhances explainability and supports debiasing efforts: applicable during either training or post-hoc validation, our method can disentangle task-related information and proposes itself as a tool to analyze biases. Evaluation on traditional benchmarks demonstrates its effectiveness in detecting biases and even disclaiming them, showcasing its broad applicability for model diagnosis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.09570,
  title  = {Say My Name: a Model's Bias Discovery Framework},
  author = {Massimiliano Ciranni and Luca Molinaro and Carlo Alberto Barbano and Attilio Fiandrotti and Vittorio Murino and Vito Paolo Pastore and Enzo Tartaglione},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.09570},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:16:05.584Z