# The Fairness Stitch: Unveiling the Potential of Model Stitching in Neural Network De-Biasing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.03532 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03532/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [Opening the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks via Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00810/) (2017)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05144/) (2017)
- [Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02937/) (2022)
- [Fairness in Machine Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04053/) (2020)
- [Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08010/) (2018)
- [Fairness without Demographics through Adversarially Reweighted Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13114/) (2020)
- [Understanding image representations by measuring their equivariance and equivalence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5908/) (2014)
- [Revisiting Model Stitching to Compare Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07682/) (2021)
- [Surgical Fine-Tuning Improves Adaptation to Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11466/) (2022)
- [Censoring Representations with an Adversary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05897/) (2015)
- [Fairness in Recommendation Ranking through Pairwise Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00780/) (2019)
- [Putting Fairness Principles into Practice: Challenges, Metrics, and Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04562/) (2019)
- [FNNC: Achieving Fairness through Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00247/) (2018)
- [Technical Challenges for Training Fair Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06764/) (2021)
- [Last-Layer Fairness Fine-tuning is Simple and Effective for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03935/) (2023)
- [README: REpresentation learning by fairness-Aware Disentangling MEthod](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03775/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The pursuit of fairness in machine learning models has emerged as a critical research challenge in different applications ranging from bank loan approval to face detection. Despite the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence algorithms across various domains, concerns persist regarding the presence of biases and discrimination within these models. To address this pressing issue, this study introduces a novel method called "The Fairness Stitch (TFS)" to enhance fairness in deep learning models. This method combines model stitching and training jointly, while incorporating fairness constraints. In this research, we assess the effectiveness of our proposed method by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of two well-known datasets, CelebA and UTKFace. We systematically compare the performance of our approach with the existing baseline method. Our findings reveal a notable improvement in achieving a balanced trade-off between fairness and performance, highlighting the promising potential of our method to address bias-related challenges and foster equitable outcomes in machine learning models. This paper poses a challenge to the conventional wisdom of the effectiveness of the last layer in deep learning models for de-biasing.