Skip to content
Review Open access

Exploring Backdoor Vulnerabilities and Fairness Challenges in Generative Models: A Survey

Sep 2026 · ACM Computing Surveys · 0 citations · 154 references

TL;DR

This is the first study combining surveys of backdoor attacks and fairness in AI models to examine security vulnerabilities that can lead to bias susceptibility and unfair outcomes, providing a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and progress in ensuring fairness and security in AI systems.

Abstract

Global connectivity has increased societal diversity worldwide, fostering growth and dispelling negative stereotypes. However, ensuring equality remains challenging, with some groups favoured and others facing unequal opportunities. The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises automation, innovation, and industry transformation. Yet, as AI becomes pervasive, establishing trust in algorithmic decision-making is crucial to eliminate bias and ensure fair outcomes. Adversarial attacks, particularly backdoor attacks, pose significant threats to AI systems. Research must focus on mitigating discrimination and bias in AI models, emphasising ethical considerations and model interpretability. Accordingly, this paper surveys the critical aspects of fairness, bias, and backdoor attacks in AI systems, integrating significant and state-of-the-art research. This paper begins by defining key concepts, including fairness, bias, and backdoor attacks, and exploring related elements. A thorough survey highlights key studies on fairness and bias analysis, metrics for measurement, and various fairness attacks. This paper further examines methodologies for performing backdoor attacks and their implications for AI systems. Additionally, this paper explores the latest defence mechanisms addressing fairness and bias issues and mitigating backdoor attacks, showcasing advancements in safeguarding AI integrity. The survey concludes with discussions on popular datasets, future research directions, and potential limitations in ongoing developments. This is the first study combining surveys of backdoor attacks and fairness in AI models to examine security vulnerabilities that can lead to bias susceptibility and unfair outcomes. By consolidating crucial research insights, this survey provides a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and progress in ensuring fairness and security in AI systems, offering valuable perspectives for researchers and practitioners.

Read PDF

Similar papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Position: Fairness Failure in Generative Models is an Evaluation Problem

This position paper argues that fairness failures in generative models, albeit driven by multiple factors, are ultimately stemming from an evaluation problem: fairness findings are rarely comparable across papers or actionable for deployment decisions.

M. Vladimirova, Jean-Yves Franceschi, Thibaut Issenhuth · 0 citations
Open access Aug 2026

Fairness Invariants: A Relational Approach to Explaining and Mitigating Fairness Bugs

REMI, a framework for the automated localization, explanation, and mitigation of individual discrimination, is presented, which introduces a bidirectional relational explanation framework that learns over paired examples $(x, x')$ to identify regions of the input space where fairness is violated.

Ranit Debnath Akash, Ashish Kumar, Gang Tan et al. · 0 citations
#large language models Review Open access Sep 2026

A review of bias detection and fairness auditing techniques in LLMs

A thorough literature review is provided to encapsulate prior research on bias identification and fairness auditing, categorizing the findings according to various stages of study and proposing a unified pipeline for dataset integration and a modular framework for bias auditing.

Nani Kartik Kaveti, T. Pattanshetti · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems

Public institutions increasingly procure AI systems whose design they cannot inspect or change. In higher education, proprietary Early Warning Systems (EWS) leave colleges with few options beyond adjusting model outputs to address inequity. This raises the question of how fairness work is coordinated among vendors, ins...

Kelly McConvey, Angelina Zhai, Rebecca Li et al. · 0 citations
Open access Sep 2026

Individual and group fairness assessments via counterfactual explanations

This study explores the potential of counterfactual explanations to assess artificial intelligence (AI) fairness, especially in critical decision-making systems. Predictive models may amplify biases inherent in data sets or algorithms, and given the absence of a universally accepted fairness metric, a case-specific app...

Federico Sabbatini, Roberta Calegari · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Anchoring Bias: A Persistent Fairness Backdoor Attack against MLLMs under Continual Learning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where fairness is a critical safety requirement. In practice, these models are continually updated through continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving tasks and data distributions. Prior work has shown that backdoor attacks can m...

Yuyang Luo, Kai Shu · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.