Fairness-Aware Low-Rank Representation Fine-Tuning

Abstract

Pre-trained foundation models can be efficiently adapted for specific tasks using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), but the fairness properties of these adapted classifiers remain underexplored. Existing fairness-aware fine-tuning methods assume that sensitive attribute labels are available alongside downstream task labels, which often fails in practice due to user consent limitations or privacy constraints. To address this gap, we investigate fairness-aware LoRA fine-tuning using separate datasets for downstream tasks and sensitive attributes. We introduce four fairness-aware LoRA strategies: sensitive unlearning, adversarial debiasing, orthogonality-based disentanglement, and entropy maximization. Through comprehensive experiments on standard algorithmic fairness datasets using an ImageNet pre-trained ViT-Base model, we evaluate these methods across multiple utility and fairness metrics. Our orthogonality-based disentanglement and entropy maximization approaches consistently outperform standard fine-tuning in both overall utility and fairness, while adversarial debiasing shows less consistent improvements and sensitive unlearning proves ineffective for classification tasks. However, fairness-aware methods underperform on certain metrics like subgroup-wise false-positive rate ratios, highlighting fundamental incompatibilities between fairness objectives. These findings demonstrate the potential of fairness-aware LoRA fine-tuning while revealing inherent challenges of simultaneously optimizing multiple fairness criteria in parameter-efficient adaptation.