LightFair: Towards an Efficient Alternative for Fair T2I Diffusion via Debiasing Pre-trained Text Encoders

This paper explores a novel lightweight approach LightFair to achieve fair text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs) by addressing the adverse effects of the text encoder. Most existing methods either couple different parts of the diffusion model for full-parameter training or rely on auxiliary networks for correction. They incur heavy training or sampling burden and unsatisfactory performance. Since T2I DMs consist of multiple components, with the text encoder being the most fine-tunable and front-end module, this paper focuses on mitigating bias by fine-tuning text embeddings. To validate feasibility, we observe that the text encoder's neutral embedding output shows substantial skewness across image embeddings of various attributes in the CLIP space. More importantly, the noise prediction network further amplifies this imbalance. To finetune the text embedding, we propose a collaborative distance-constrained debiasing strategy that balances embedding distances to improve fairness without auxiliary references. However, mitigating bias can compromise the original generation quality. To address this, we introduce a two-stage text-guided sampling strategy to limit when the debiased text encoder intervenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LightFair is effective and efficient. Notably, on Stable Diffusion v1.5, our method achieves SOTA debiasing at just $1/4$ of the training burden, with virtually no increase in sampling burden. The code is available at https://github.com/boyuh/LightFair.