GAMMA-FACE: GAussian Mixture Models Amend Diffusion Models for Bias Mitigation in Face Images

Basudha Pal*, Arunkumar Kannan*, Ram Prabhakar Kathirvel, Alice O'Toole, Rama Chellappa ;

"Significant advancements have been achieved in the domain of face generation with the adoption of diffusion models. However, diffusion models tend to amplify biases during the generative process, resulting in an uneven distribution of sensitive facial attributes such as age, gender, and race. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address this issue by debiasing the attributes in the images generated by diffusion models. Our approach involves disentangling facial attributes by localizing the means within the latent space of the diffusion model using Gaussian mixture models (GMM). This method, leveraging the adaptable latent structure of diffusion models, allows us to localize the subspace responsible for generating specific attributes on-the-fly without the need for retraining. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique across various face datasets, resulting in fairer data generation while preserving sample quality. Furthermore, we empirically illustrate its effectiveness in reducing bias in downstream classification tasks without compromising performance by augmenting the original dataset with fairly generated data."