# Bias In, Bias Out? Finding Unbiased Subnetworks in Vanilla Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05582 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05582/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 89 of its 110 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [A Simple and Effective Pruning Approach for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11695/) (2023)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness without Training Group Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09044/) (2021)
- [Pruning neural networks without any data by iteratively conserving synaptic flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05467/) (2020)
- [Nuanced Metrics for Measuring Unintended Bias with Real Data for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04561/) (2019)
- [Movement Pruning: Adaptive Sparsity by Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07683/) (2020)
- [An Investigation of Why Overparameterization Exacerbates Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04345/) (2020)
- [Environment Inference for Invariant Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07249/) (2020)
- [Don't Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03683/) (2019)
- [Learning Not to Learn: Training Deep Neural Networks with Biased Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10352/) (2018)
- [Towards Fairness in Visual Recognition: Effective Strategies for Bias Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11834/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Representations with Probabilistic Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10837/) (2018)
- [Deconstructing Lottery Tickets: Zeros, Signs, and the Supermask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01067/) (2019)
- [Structured Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04732/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Deep Neural Network Pruning-Taxonomy, Comparison, Analysis, and Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06767/) (2023)
- [Learning De-biased Representations with Biased Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02806/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The issue of algorithmic biases in deep learning has led to the development of various debiasing techniques, many of which perform complex training procedures or dataset manipulation. However, an intriguing question arises: is it possible to extract fair and bias-agnostic subnetworks from standard vanilla-trained models without relying on additional data, such as unbiased training set? In this work, we introduce Bias-Invariant Subnetwork Extraction (BISE), a learning strategy that identifies and isolates "bias-free" subnetworks that already exist within conventionally trained models, without retraining or finetuning the original parameters. Our approach demonstrates that such subnetworks can be extracted via pruning and can operate without modification, effectively relying less on biased features and maintaining robust performance. Our findings contribute towards efficient bias mitigation through structural adaptation of pre-trained neural networks via parameter removal, as opposed to costly strategies that are either data-centric or involve (re)training all model parameters. Extensive experiments on common benchmarks show the advantages of our approach in terms of the performance and computational efficiency of the resulting debiased model.