# Debiasing Methods for Fairer Neural Models in Vision and Language Research: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.05617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 154 of its 233 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 154)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Datasheets for Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09010/) (2018)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [Model Cards for Model Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03993/) (2018)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [Counterfactual Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06856/) (2017)
- [Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07125/) (2019)
- [GPT-NeoX-20B: An Open-Source Autoregressive Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06745/) (2022)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [Fair prediction with disparate impact: A study of bias in recidivism prediction instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07524/) (2016)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Verifiable evaluations of machine learning models using zkSNARKs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02675/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Fairness in Large Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Demographic Attributes and Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17974/) (2024)
- [The Pursuit of Fairness in Artificial Intelligence Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17333/) (2024)
- [Fairness and Bias Mitigation in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02464/) (2024)
- [A Survey on fMRI-based Brain Decoding for Reconstructing Multimodal Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15978/) (2025)
- [Unveiling and Mitigating Generalized Biases of DNNs through the Intrinsic Dimensions of Perceptual Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13859/) (2024)
- [SDFD: Building a Versatile Synthetic Face Image Dataset with Diverse Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17255/) (2024)
- [Fair-MoE: Fairness-Oriented Mixture of Experts in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06094/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Bias Using Model-Agnostic Data Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05031/) (2024)
- [Attention IoU: Examining Biases in CelebA using Attention Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19846/) (2025)
- [MoENAS: Mixture-of-Expert based Neural Architecture Search for jointly Accurate, Fair, and Robust Edge Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07422/) (2025)
- [Inference-Time Machine Unlearning via Gated Activation Redirection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12765/) (2026)
- [Social Science Is Necessary for Operationalizing Socially Responsible Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16355/) (2024)
- [Inference Time Debiasing Concepts in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14933/) (2025)
- [Happy Young Women, Grumpy Old Men? Emotion-Driven Demographic Biases in Synthetic Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00032/) (2026)
- [FairLLaVA: Fairness-Aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Vision-Language Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26008/) (2026)
- [HoloFair: Unified T2I Fairness Evaluation and Fair-GRPO Debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24687/) (2026)
- [Balancing the Scales: Enhancing Fairness in Facial Expression Recognition with Latent Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19444/) (2024)
- [TransFair: Transferring Fairness from Ocular Disease Classification to Progression Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00051/) (2024)
- [A Framework for Benchmarking Fairness-Utility Trade-offs in Text-to-Image Models via Pareto Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16752/) (2025)
- [Responsible AI for General-Purpose Systems: Overview, Challenges, and A Path Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13122/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking Fairness in Spiking Neural Networks: Data Bias, Spurious Features, and Hardware Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27407/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite being responsible for state-of-the-art results in several computer vision and natural language processing tasks, neural networks have faced harsh criticism due to some of their current shortcomings. One of them is that neural networks are correlation machines prone to model biases within the data instead of focusing on actual useful causal relationships. This problem is particularly serious in application domains affected by aspects such as race, gender, and age. To prevent models from incurring on unfair decision-making, the AI community has concentrated efforts in correcting algorithmic biases, giving rise to the research area now widely known as fairness in AI. In this survey paper, we provide an in-depth overview of the main debiasing methods for fairness-aware neural networks in the context of vision and language research. We propose a novel taxonomy to better organize the literature on debiasing methods for fairness, and we discuss the current challenges, trends, and important future work directions for the interested researcher and practitioner.