# Constructing Fair Latent Space for Intersection of Fairness and Explainability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17523/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [Fair prediction with disparate impact: A study of bias in recidivism prediction instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07524/) (2016)
- [On Variational Bounds of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06922/) (2019)
- [Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward a Meaningful and Decodable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15640/) (2021)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [DALL-Eval: Probing the Reasoning Skills and Social Biases of Text-to-Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04053/) (2022)
- [Empirical Risk Minimization under Fairness Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08626/) (2018)
- [Why Normalizing Flows Fail to Detect Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08545/) (2020)
- [Path-Specific Counterfactual Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08139/) (2018)
- [Correct-N-Contrast: A Contrastive Approach for Improving Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01517/) (2022)
- [Formalizing Trust in Artificial Intelligence: Prerequisites, Causes and Goals of Human Trust in AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07487/) (2020)
- [Fair Attribute Classification through Latent Space De-biasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01469/) (2020)
- [A Deeper Look at Dataset Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.01257/) (2015)
- [A Mutual Information Maximization Perspective of Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08350/) (2019)
- [Fairness by Learning Orthogonal Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05707/) (2020)
- [Image Counterfactual Sensitivity Analysis for Detecting Unintended Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06439/) (2019)
- [Understanding and Mitigating Exploding Inverses in Invertible Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09347/) (2020)
- [Fair Contrastive Learning for Facial Attribute Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16209/) (2022)
- [FACET: Fairness in Computer Vision Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00035/) (2023)
- [A Disentangling Invertible Interpretation Network for Explaining Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13166/) (2020)
- [Evaluating and Mitigating Bias in Image Classifiers: A Causal Perspective Using Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08270/) (2020)
- [Gender Slopes: Counterfactual Fairness for Computer Vision Models by Attribute Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10430/) (2020)
- [Explainability for fair machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07389/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Data-Driven Analysis of Intersectional Bias in Image Classification: A Framework with Bias-Weighted Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16072/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the use of machine learning models has increased, numerous studies have aimed to enhance fairness. However, research on the intersection of fairness and explainability remains insufficient, leading to potential issues in gaining the trust of actual users. Here, we propose a novel module that constructs a fair latent space, enabling faithful explanation while ensuring fairness. The fair latent space is constructed by disentangling and redistributing labels and sensitive attributes, allowing the generation of counterfactual explanations for each type of information. Our module is attached to a pretrained generative model, transforming its biased latent space into a fair latent space. Additionally, since only the module needs to be trained, there are advantages in terms of time and cost savings, without the need to train the entire generative model. We validate the fair latent space with various fairness metrics and demonstrate that our approach can effectively provide explanations for biased decisions and assurances of fairness.