When Are Learning Biases Equivalent? A Unifying Framework for Fairness, Robustness, and Distribution Shift

arXiv — stat.ML•Wednesday, November 12, 2025 at 5:00:00 AM

The recent study titled 'When Are Learning Biases Equivalent?' introduces a comprehensive theoretical framework aimed at addressing the multifaceted challenges of bias in machine learning systems, including fairness, robustness, and distribution shifts. The authors formalize biases as violations of conditional independence, leading to the identification of equivalence conditions that link spurious correlations, subpopulation shifts, class imbalances, and fairness violations. Their findings predict that a spurious correlation of strength α results in a degradation of accuracy for the worst-performing group that is comparable to the effects of a subpopulation imbalance ratio r. This theoretical framework was empirically validated using six datasets and three different machine learning architectures, demonstrating that the predicted equivalences hold within a margin of 3% accuracy for the worst group. This work not only enhances our understanding of bias mechanisms in machine learning but…

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