Towards Fairness for the Right Reasons: Using Saliency Maps to Evaluate Bias Removal in Neural Networks

The widespread adoption of machine learning systems has raised critical concerns about fairness and bias, making mitigating harmful biases essential for AI development. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between fairness improvement and the removal of harmful biases in neural networks applied to computer vision tasks. First, we introduce a set of novel XAI-based metrics that analyze saliency maps to assess shifts in a model's decision-making process. Then, we demonstrate that successful debiasing methods systematically redirect model focus away from protected attributes. Additionally, we show that techniques originally developed for artifact removal can be effectively repurposed for fairness. These findings underscore the importance of ensuring that models are fair for the right reasons, contributing to the development of more ethical and trustworthy AI systems.