GANDiff FR: Hybrid GAN Diffusion Synthesis for Causal Bias Attribution in Face Recognition

We introduce GANDiff FR, the first synthetic framework that precisely controls demographic and environmental factors to measure, explain, and reduce bias with reproducible rigor. GANDiff FR unifies StyleGAN3-based identity-preserving generation with diffusion-based attribute control, enabling fine-grained manipulation of pose around 30 degrees, illumination (four directions), and expression (five levels) under ceteris paribus conditions. We synthesize 10,000 demographically balanced faces across five cohorts validated for realism via automated detection (98.2%) and human review (89%) to isolate and quantify bias drivers. Benchmarking ArcFace, CosFace, and AdaFace under matched operating points shows AdaFace reduces inter-group TPR disparity by 60% (2.5% vs. 6.3%), with illumination accounting for 42% of residual bias. Cross-dataset evaluation on RFW, BUPT, and CASIA WebFace confirms strong synthetic-to-real transfer (r 0.85). Despite around 20% computational overhead relative to pure GANs, GANDiff FR yields three times more attribute-conditioned variants, establishing a reproducible, regulation-aligned (EU AI Act) standard for fairness auditing. Code and data are released to support transparent, scalable bias evaluation.