Papers › Medical Image Debiasing by Learning Adaptive Agreement from a Biased Council
Medical Image Debiasing by Learning Adaptive Agreement from a Biased Council
Luyang Luo, Xin Huang, Minghao Wang, Zhuoyue Wan, Hao Chen
Deep learning could be prone to learning shortcuts raised by dataset bias and result in inaccurate, unreliable, and unfair models, which impedes its adoption in real-world clinical applications. Despite its significance, there is a dearth of research in the medical image classification domain to address dataset bias. Furthermore, the bias labels are often agnostic, as identifying biases can be laborious and depend on post-hoc interpretation. This paper proposes learning Adaptive Agreement from a Biased Council (Ada-ABC), a debiasing framework that does not rely on explicit bias labels to tackle dataset bias in medical images. Ada-ABC develops a biased council consisting of multiple classifiers optimized with generalized cross entropy loss to learn the dataset bias. A debiasing model is then simultaneously trained under the guidance of the biased council. Specifically, the debiasing model is required to learn adaptive agreement with the biased council by agreeing on the correctly predicted samples and disagreeing on the wrongly predicted samples by the biased council. In this way, the debiasing model could learn the target attribute on the samples without spurious correlations while also avoiding ignoring the rich information in samples with spurious correlations. We theoretically demonstrated that the debiasing model could learn the target features when the biased model successfully captures dataset bias. Moreover, to our best knowledge, we constructed the first medical debiasing benchmark from four datasets containing seven different bias scenarios. Our extensive experiments practically showed that our proposed Ada-ABC outperformed competitive approaches, verifying its effectiveness in mitigating dataset bias for medical image classification. The codes and organized benchmark datasets will be made publicly available.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections