Latent Feature Alignment: Discovering Biased and Interpretable Subpopulations in Face Recognition Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission18508 Authors

Keywords: Fairness, bias discovery, face recognition, latent directions, interpretability

TL;DR: We contribute Latent Feature Alignment (LFA), an attribute-label-free method for bias auditing in face recognition that uses latent directions to (i) form semantically coherent subpopulations and (ii) discover interpretable directions.

Abstract: Modern face recognition models achieve high overall accuracy but continue to exhibit systematic biases that disproportionately affect certain subpopulations. Conventional bias evaluation frameworks rely on labeled attributes to form subpopulations, which are expensive to obtain and limited to predefined categories. We introduce Latent Feature Alignment (LFA), an attribute-label-free algorithm that uses latent directions to identify subpopulations. This yields two main benefits over standard clustering: (i) semantically coherent grouping, where faces sharing common attributes are grouped together more reliably than by proximity-based methods, and (ii) discovery of interpretable directions, which correspond to semantic attributes such as age, ethnicity, or attire. Across four state-of-the-art recognition models (ArcFace, CosFace, ElasticFace, PartialFC) and two benchmarks (RFW, CelebA), LFA consistently outperforms k-means and nearest-neighbor search in intra-group semantic coherence, while uncovering interpretable latent directions aligned with demographic and contextual attributes. These results position LFA as a practical method for representation auditing of face recognition models, enabling practitioners to identify and interpret biased subpopulations without predefined attribute annotations.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 18508