Debias Anything: Fairness with Diversity without Supervision in Diffusion Models

Abstract

Although diffusion models produce high-quality images, they also reproduce and amplify demographic imbalances in their training data. Debiasing their generation process post-training w.r.t. some sensitive attribute usually relies on classifier guidance or explicit text extra-conditioning, but this reduces methods' applicability and output diversity. Conversely, methods promoting diversity alone do not ensure fair attribute representation. In this paper, we propose a method tackling fairness and diversity jointly that is generally applicable to any diffusion model and any sensitive attribute. To this end, an adapter connects the frozen diffusion model to a pretrained vision-language embedding space, enabling fairness and diversity guidance without sensitive-attribute annotations. For fairness, pairs of text prompts define attribute directions which guide batch composition towards specific proportions. For diversity, we introduce a score measuring disagreement between the semantic estimates derived from this representation. The formulation supports unconditional and text-conditional diffusion models, while requiring no prior knowledge or data of sensitive attribute. Experiments confirm that our method improves quality and diversity scores at comparable fairness levels.