Fairness is Not Flat: Geometric Phase Transitions Against Shortcut Learning
A geometric method to fight shortcut learning in neural networks: a tiny single-neuron 'auditor' exposes the spurious features a model would otherwise exploit (like Capital-Gain in the Adult Census dataset), and pruning them forces the network into a higher-capacity regime where it learns fairer, merit-based decisions. The approach cuts counterfactual gender bias from 21.18% to 7.66%, outperforms L1 regularization, and runs at a fraction of the cost of methods like Just Train Twice.
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