Fairness Without Labels: Pseudo-Balancing for Bias Mitigation in Face Gender Classification (2510.10191v1)

Abstract: Face gender classification models often reflect and amplify demographic biases present in their training data, leading to uneven performance across gender and racial subgroups. We introduce pseudo-balancing, a simple and effective strategy for mitigating such biases in semi-supervised learning. Our method enforces demographic balance during pseudo-label selection, using only unlabeled images from a race-balanced dataset without requiring access to ground-truth annotations. We evaluate pseudo-balancing under two conditions: (1) fine-tuning a biased gender classifier using unlabeled images from the FairFace dataset, and (2) stress-testing the method with intentionally imbalanced training data to simulate controlled bias scenarios. In both cases, models are evaluated on the All-Age-Faces (AAF) benchmark, which contains a predominantly East Asian population. Our results show that pseudo-balancing consistently improves fairness while preserving or enhancing accuracy. The method achieves 79.81% overall accuracy - a 6.53% improvement over the baseline - and reduces the gender accuracy gap by 44.17%. In the East Asian subgroup, where baseline disparities exceeded 49%, the gap is narrowed to just 5.01%. These findings suggest that even in the absence of label supervision, access to a demographically balanced or moderately skewed unlabeled dataset can serve as a powerful resource for debiasing existing computer vision models.