Vision–Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success on multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification, yet they can demonstrate demographic biases even when explicit protected attributes are absent during training. In this work, we focus on automated glaucoma screening from retinal fundus images, a critical application given that glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness and disproportionately affects underserved populations. Building on a reweighting-based contrastive learning framework, we introduce an attribute-agnostic debiasing method that (i) infers proxy subgroups via unsupervised clustering of image-image embeddings, (ii) computes gradient-similarity weights between the CLIP-style multimodal loss and a SimCLR-style image-pair contrastive loss, and (iii) applies these weights in a joint, top-k weighted objective to upweight underperforming clusters. This label-free approach adaptively targets the hardest examples, thereby reducing subgroup disparities. We evaluate our method on the Harvard-FairVLMed glaucoma subset, reporting Equalized-Odds Distance (EOD), Equal- ized Subgroup AUC (ES-AUC), and Groupwise AUC to demonstrate equitable performance across inferred demographic subgroups.

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Addressing Bias in VLMs for Glaucoma Detection Without Protected Attribute Supervision

  • Ahsan Habib Akash,
  • Greg Murray,
  • Annahita Amireskandari,
  • Joel Palko,
  • Carol Laxson,
  • Binod Bhattarai,
  • Prashnna Gyawali

摘要

Vision–Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success on multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification, yet they can demonstrate demographic biases even when explicit protected attributes are absent during training. In this work, we focus on automated glaucoma screening from retinal fundus images, a critical application given that glaucoma is a leading cause of irreversible blindness and disproportionately affects underserved populations. Building on a reweighting-based contrastive learning framework, we introduce an attribute-agnostic debiasing method that (i) infers proxy subgroups via unsupervised clustering of image-image embeddings, (ii) computes gradient-similarity weights between the CLIP-style multimodal loss and a SimCLR-style image-pair contrastive loss, and (iii) applies these weights in a joint, top-k weighted objective to upweight underperforming clusters. This label-free approach adaptively targets the hardest examples, thereby reducing subgroup disparities. We evaluate our method on the Harvard-FairVLMed glaucoma subset, reporting Equalized-Odds Distance (EOD), Equal- ized Subgroup AUC (ES-AUC), and Groupwise AUC to demonstrate equitable performance across inferred demographic subgroups.