# Achieve Fairness without Demographics for Dermatological Disease Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08066 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08066/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07593/) (2018)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [Fairness Without Demographics in Repeated Loss Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08010/) (2018)
- [AI Fairness 360: An Extensible Toolkit for Detecting, Understanding, and Mitigating Unwanted Algorithmic Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01943/) (2018)
- [Learning Not to Learn: Training Deep Neural Networks with Biased Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10352/) (2018)
- [Fairness without Demographics through Adversarially Reweighted Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13114/) (2020)
- [BCN20000: Dermoscopic Lesions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02288/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Neural Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11714/) (2018)
- [Evaluating Deep Neural Networks Trained on Clinical Images in Dermatology with the Fitzpatrick 17k Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09957/) (2021)
- [Fairness in Deep Learning: A Computational Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08843/) (2019)
- [Analyzing and Improving Representations with the Soft Nearest Neighbor Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01889/) (2019)
- [Fair Contrastive Learning for Facial Attribute Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16209/) (2022)
- [Fairness via Representation Neutralization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12674/) (2021)
- [SAM.MD: Zero-shot medical image segmentation capabilities of the Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05396/) (2023)
- [Fair Feature Distillation for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04411/) (2021)
- [FairPrune: Achieving Fairness Through Pruning for Dermatological Disease Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02110/) (2022)
- [Fairness-aware Adversarial Perturbation Towards Bias Mitigation for Deployed Deep Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01584/) (2022)
- [Towards Fair Classifiers Without Sensitive Attributes: Exploring Biases in Related Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14537/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Achieving Fairness Through Channel Pruning for Dermatological Disease Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08681/) (2024)
- [Investigating the Quality of DermaMNIST and Fitzpatrick17k Dermatological Image Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14497/) (2024)
- [CurvFed: Curvature-Aligned Federated Learning for Fairness without Demographics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19725/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Fairness and Mitigating Bias in Machine Learning: A Novel Technique using Tensor Data and Bayesian Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11627/) (2025)
- [Toward Fairness via Maximum Mean Discrepancy Regularization on Logits Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13061/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection in Medical Imaging Using Multi-Exit Class Activation Maps and Feature Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08604/) (2025)
- [TrustSkin: A Fairness Pipeline for Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis Across Skin Tone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20637/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Impact of Skin Color on Skin Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29694/) (2026)
- [Evaluating the Impact of Medical Image Reconstruction on Downstream AI Fairness and Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10904/) (2026)
- [FairEnc: A Fair Vision-Language Model with Fair Vision and Text Encoders for Glaucoma Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04882/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In medical image diagnosis, fairness has become increasingly crucial. Without bias mitigation, deploying unfair AI would harm the interests of the underprivileged population and potentially tear society apart. Recent research addresses prediction biases in deep learning models concerning demographic groups (e.g., gender, age, and race) by utilizing demographic (sensitive attribute) information during training. However, many sensitive attributes naturally exist in dermatological disease images. If the trained model only targets fairness for a specific attribute, it remains unfair for other attributes. Moreover, training a model that can accommodate multiple sensitive attributes is impractical due to privacy concerns. To overcome this, we propose a method enabling fair predictions for sensitive attributes during the testing phase without using such information during training. Inspired by prior work highlighting the impact of feature entanglement on fairness, we enhance the model features by capturing the features related to the sensitive and target attributes and regularizing the feature entanglement between corresponding classes. This ensures that the model can only classify based on the features related to the target attribute without relying on features associated with sensitive attributes, thereby improving fairness and accuracy. Additionally, we use disease masks from the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to enhance the quality of the learned feature. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve fairness in classification compared to state-of-the-art methods in two dermatological disease datasets.