# Active Data Sampling and Generation for Bias Remediation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20414/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00236/) (2020)
- [Fairness in Machine Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04053/) (2020)
- [Towards Fairness in Visual Recognition: Effective Strategies for Bias Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11834/) (2019)
- [Fairness And Bias in Artificial Intelligence: A Brief Survey of Sources, Impacts, And Mitigation Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07683/) (2023)
- [Data Feedback Loops: Model-driven Amplification of Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03942/) (2022)
- [The Clever Hans Mirage: A Comprehensive Survey on Spurious Correlations in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12715/) (2024)
- [Active Sampling for Min-Max Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06879/) (2020)
- [Bias Mimicking: A Simple Sampling Approach for Bias Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15605/) (2022)
- [Men Also Do Laundry: Multi-Attribute Bias Amplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11924/) (2022)
- [Active sampling: A machine-learning-assisted framework for finite population inference with optimal subsamples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10024/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adequate sampling space coverage is the keystone to effectively train trustworthy Machine Learning models. Unfortunately, real data do carry several inherent risks due to the many potential biases they exhibit when gathered without a proper random sampling over the reference population, and most of the times this is way too expensive or time consuming to be a viable option. Depending on how training data have been gathered, unmitigated biases can lead to harmful or discriminatory consequences that ultimately hinders large scale applicability of pre-trained models and undermine their truthfulness or fairness expectations. In this paper, a mixed active sampling and data generation strategy -- called samplation -- is proposed as a mean to compensate during fine-tuning of a pre-trained classifer the unfair classifications it produces, assuming that the training data come from a non-probabilistic sampling schema. Given a pre-trained classifier, first a fairness metric is evaluated on a test set, then new reservoirs of labeled data are generated and finally a number of reversely-biased artificial samples are generated for the fine-tuning of the model. Using as case study Deep Models for visual semantic role labeling, the proposed method has been able to fully cure a simulated gender bias starting from a 90/10 imbalance, with only a small percentage of new data and with a minor effect on accuracy.