AIM-Fair: Advancing Algorithmic Fairness via Selectively Fine-Tuning Biased Models with Contextual Synthetic Data

Recent advances in generative models have sparked research on improving model fairness with AI-generated data. However, existing methods often face limitations in the diversity and quality of synthetic data, leading to compromised fairness and overall model accuracy. Moreover, many approaches rely on the availability of demographic group labels, which are often costly to annotate. This paper proposes AIM-Fair, aiming to overcome these limitations and harness the potential of cutting-edge generative models in promoting algorithmic fairness. We investigate a fine-tuning paradigm starting from a biased model initially trained on real-world data without demographic annotations. This model is then fine-tuned using unbiased synthetic data generated by a state-of-the-art diffusion model to improve its fairness. Two key challenges are identified in this fine-tuning paradigm, 1) the low quality of synthetic data, which can still happen even with advanced generative models, and 2) the domain and bias gap between real and synthetic data. To address the limitation of synthetic data quality, we propose Contextual Synthetic Data Generation (CSDG) to generate data using a text-to-image diffusion model (T2I) with prompts generated by a context-aware LLM, ensuring both data diversity and control of bias in synthetic data. To resolve domain and bias shifts, we introduce a novel selective fine-tuning scheme in which only model parameters more sensitive to bias and less sensitive to domain shift are updated. Experiments on CelebA and UTKFace datasets show that our AIM-Fair improves model fairness while maintaining utility, outperforming both fully and partially fine-tuned approaches to model fairness.