REVIEW 1 major objections 61 references
PecMan jointly models subgroup reliability, decision allocation, and collaborative prediction to improve fairness-accuracy trade-offs in medical image analysis.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · grok-4.3
2026-07-01 08:24 UTC pith:K4U2ZSUG
load-bearing objection PecMan combines fairness and human-AI allocation in one framework for medical imaging but the abstract leaves the actual results and methods uncheckable. the 1 major comments →
People-Centred Medical Image Analysis via Fairness-Aware Human-AI Cooperation
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
PecMan achieves consistently improved trade-offs among predictive accuracy, subgroup equity, and human involvement by combining subgroup-specialised predictors with a gating and consolidation mechanism that dynamically assigns cases to automated models, human experts, or their combination.
What carries the argument
Subgroup-specialised predictors together with a gating and consolidation mechanism that performs input-dependent allocation without sensitive attributes at test time.
Load-bearing premise
Subgroup-specialised predictors can be trained effectively and the gating mechanism can allocate decisions accurately based on input features without access to sensitive attributes during testing.
What would settle it
Running the same experiments on additional medical imaging datasets and finding that PecMan produces no better accuracy-equity-human-involvement trade-offs than methods addressing fairness or cooperation separately would falsify the central claim.
If this is right
- Subgroup-specialised predictors raise reliability for different patient groups under the same allocation rules.
- Input-dependent allocation without test-time sensitive attributes supports practical deployment where such attributes are unavailable.
- The multi-agent gating analysis supplies bounds on selection regret and characterises fairness-coverage trade-offs.
- The FairHAI benchmark supplies a concrete way to measure joint performance on accuracy, equity, and human workload.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- If the gating works reliably from input features alone, deployed systems may avoid collecting sensitive attributes at inference time.
- The same joint modeling of reliability and allocation could be tested in other high-stakes classification settings that involve both subgroup disparities and expert review.
- The selection-regret analysis offers a template for bounding performance in other multi-agent routing problems.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces PecMan, a framework for fairness-aware human-AI cooperative classification in medical image analysis. It jointly models subgroup-dependent reliability, decision allocation, and collaborative prediction using subgroup-specialised predictors and a gating mechanism that assigns cases to AI, humans, or combination without sensitive attributes at test time. The work also presents the FairHAI benchmark for evaluating trade-offs between accuracy, equity, and human involvement, along with a theoretical analysis of selection regret and fairness-coverage trade-offs. Experiments on multiple medical imaging datasets are claimed to show improved trade-offs over methods addressing fairness or human-AI cooperation in isolation.
Significance. If the results hold, this work would be significant for integrating fairness into human-AI decision making in medical domains. The theoretical analysis of multi-agent gating via selection regret and the characterisation of fairness-coverage trade-offs under input-dependent allocation represent a strength, providing analytical grounding beyond empirical claims. The introduction of the FairHAI benchmark could facilitate future research on these trade-offs.
major comments (1)
- [Abstract] The abstract states the framework and claims improved trade-offs but provides no details on mathematical formulations, experimental setups, statistical tests, or data handling, preventing assessment of whether the data supports the claims.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for their review and for acknowledging the potential significance of our work, particularly the theoretical analysis and the FairHAI benchmark. Below we address the single major comment point by point.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: [Abstract] The abstract states the framework and claims improved trade-offs but provides no details on mathematical formulations, experimental setups, statistical tests, or data handling, preventing assessment of whether the data supports the claims.
Authors: Abstracts are intentionally concise to provide a high-level overview within strict length limits and are not intended to contain full mathematical formulations, experimental protocols, or statistical details; these are provided in the body of the manuscript (mathematical model in Section 3, experimental setups and data handling in Section 4, statistical tests and results in Section 5). The referee's own summary demonstrates a clear understanding of the framework, benchmark, theoretical contributions, and experimental claims, indicating that the full manuscript permits proper assessment. We are nevertheless willing to revise the abstract to incorporate one or two additional sentences highlighting the key elements of the FairHAI benchmark and the selection-regret analysis if the editor deems it beneficial. revision: partial
Circularity Check
No significant circularity in derivation chain
full rationale
The paper introduces PecMan as a joint framework for fairness-aware allocation, the FairHAI benchmark, and a theoretical analysis of selection regret under input-dependent gating. No equations, fitted parameters, or self-citations are presented that reduce the central claims (improved accuracy-equity-human-involvement trade-offs) to inputs by construction. The empirical results across datasets and the regret analysis are described as independent of any self-definitional loops or renamed known results, making the derivation self-contained against external benchmarks.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
read the original abstract
Machine learning models for medical image analysis often exhibit subgroup-dependent performance, which impacts how decisions should be allocated between automated systems and human experts under limited resources. Prior work on AI fairness and human-AI cooperation, including learning to defer (L2D) and learning to complement (L2C), typically addresses these problems in isolation. We propose People-Centred Medical Image Analysis (PecMan), a framework for fairness-aware human-AI co-operative classification that jointly models subgroup-dependent reliability, decision allocation, and collaborative prediction. PecMan combines subgroup-specialised predictors with a gating and consolidation mechanism that dynamically assigns cases to automated models, human experts, or their combination, without requiring sensitive attributes at test time. We also introduce the FairHAI benchmark for evaluating trade-offs between predictive accuracy, subgroup equity, and human involvement. In addition, we provide a theoretical analysis of multi-agent gating via selection regret and characterise fairness-coverage trade-offs under input-dependent allocation. Experiments across multiple medical imaging datasets demonstrate that PecMan achieves consistently improved trade-offs compared to methods that address fairness or human-AI cooperation separately.
Figures
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
These developments are particularly impactful in ra- diology, where the volume of medical imaging far exceeds the capacity of the available workforce [2]
Introduction The rapid advancements in medical image analysis have led to highly ac- curate data-centric medical AI models that are increasingly being integrated into clinical practice [1]. These developments are particularly impactful in ra- diology, where the volume of medical imaging far exceeds the capacity of the available workforce [2]. By reliably ...
-
[2]
For clinicians and healthcare providers, we advocate for AI as an assistive tool that enhances human-centred decision-making rather than replacing it [3]
Literature Review This paper goes beyond classification accuracy to address the needs of key stakeholders in medical AI (i.e., clinicians, healthcare settings, patients, and regulatory agencies) by aligning system design with their workflows and pri- orities to foster trust, usability, and clinical effectiveness. For clinicians and healthcare providers, w...
-
[3]
Pre-processingapproaches(e.g., SMOTE[30])re-balancedatasetsprior to training
-
[4]
Post-processing methods (e.g., equalised odds [31]) adjust outputs after training
-
[5]
Among these, in-processing methods tend to show superior results, so we focus on these methods below
In-processing methods directly modify the training to reduce bias while maintaining performance [24, 32, 33, 34]. Among these, in-processing methods tend to show superior results, so we focus on these methods below. For instance, adversarial training [24, 32] has been widely used to minimise a model’s ability to predict sensitive at- tributes, though ofte...
-
[6]
AI defers decisions to human experts
-
[7]
learning to complement
AI makes a joint decision with human experts. Below, we explain the main HAI-CC approaches being studied in the litera- ture, relating them to these three options. �������� �� ����� ������L2D methods primarily focus on options (1) and (2), where either the AI or the human makes the final decision. These ap- proaches aim to jointly learn a predictor and a ...
-
[8]
E. J. Topol, High-performance medicine: The convergence of human and artificial intelligence, Nature medicine 25 (1) (2019) 44–56
2019
-
[9]
M. M. Abuzaid, W. Elshami, H. Tekin, B. Issa, Assessment of the will- ingness of radiologists and radiographers to accept the integration of artificial intelligence into radiology practice, Academic Radiology 29 (1) (2022) 87–94
2022
-
[10]
Derevianko, S
A. Derevianko, S. F. M. Pizzoli, F. Pesapane, A. Rotili, D. Monzani, R. Grasso, E. Cassano, G. Pravettoni, The use of artificial intelligence (ai) in the radiology field: What is the state of doctor–patient commu- nication in cancer diagnosis?, Cancers 15 (2) (2023) 470
2023
-
[11]
Zhang, Y
S. Zhang, Y. Li, W. Liu, Q. Chu, Y. Chen, A decade of review in global regulation and research of artificial intelligence medical devices (2015- 2025), Frontiers in Medicine 12 (2025) 1630408
2015
-
[12]
Jones, J
C. Jones, J. Thornton, J. C. Wyatt, Artificial intelligence and clinical decision support: clinicians’ perspectives on trust, trustworthiness, and liability, Medical law review 31 (4) (2023) 501–520
2023
-
[13]
Kumah, Artificial intelligence in healthcare and its implications for patient centered care, Discover Public Health 22 (1) (2025) 524
E. Kumah, Artificial intelligence in healthcare and its implications for patient centered care, Discover Public Health 22 (1) (2025) 524
2025
-
[14]
S. S. Jain, S. Goto, J. L. Hall, S. S. Khan, C. A. MacRae, C. Ofori, C. Pegus, M. Pencina, E. D. Peterson, L. H. Schwamm, et al., Pragmatic approaches to the evaluation and monitoring of artificial intelligence in health care: A science advisory from the american heart association, Circulation 152 (23) (2025) e433–e442
2025
-
[15]
E. U. Alum, O. P.-C. Ugwu, Artificial intelligence in personalized medicine: transforming diagnosis and treatment, Discover Applied Sci- ences 7 (3) (2025) 193
2025
-
[16]
L. A. Celi, J. Cellini, M.-L. Charpignon, E. C. Dee, F. Dernoncourt, R. Eber, W. G. Mitchell, L. Moukheiber, J. Schirmer, J. Situ, et al., Sources of bias in artificial intelligence that perpetuate healthcare dis- parities - a global review, PLOS Digital Health 1 (3) (2022) e0000022. 22
2022
-
[17]
Oakden-Rayner, J
L. Oakden-Rayner, J. Dunnmon, G. Carneiro, C. Ré, Hidden stratifica- tion causes clinically meaningful failures in machine learning for medical imaging, in: ACM CHIL, 2020, pp. 151–159
2020
-
[18]
M. A. Ricci Lara, R. Echeveste, E. Ferrante, Addressing fairness in artificialintelligenceformedicalimaging, NatureCommunications13(1) (2022) 4581
2022
-
[19]
Madras, T
D. Madras, T. Pitassi, R. Zemel, Predict responsibly: Improving fairness and accuracy by learning to defer, in: NeurIPS, Vol. 31, 2018
2018
-
[20]
Wilder, E
B. Wilder, E. Horvitz, E. Kamar, Learning to complement humans, in: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021
2021
-
[21]
Y. Zong, Y. Yang, T. Hospedales, MEDFAIR: Benchmarking fairness for medical imaging, in: ICLR, 2023
2023
-
[22]
Iqbal, M
T. Iqbal, M. Masud, B. Amin, C. Feely, M. Faherty, T. Jones, M. Tier- ney, A. Shahzad, P. Vazquez, Towards integration of artificial intelli- gence into medical devices as a real-time recommender system for per- sonalised healthcare: State-of-the-art and future prospects, Health Sci- ences Review (2024)
2024
-
[23]
Quadrianto, V
N. Quadrianto, V. Sharmanska, O. Thomas, Discovering fair represen- tations in the data domain, in: CVPR, 2019, pp. 8227–8236
2019
-
[24]
Zhang, J
Y. Zhang, J. Sang, Towards accuracy-fairness paradox: Adversarial example-based data augmentation for visual debiasing, in: ACM Multi- media, 2020
2020
-
[25]
V. V. Ramaswamy, S. S. Kim, O. Russakovsky, Fair attribute classifica- tion through latent space de-biasing, in: CVPR, 2021, pp. 9301–9310
2021
-
[26]
S. Park, J. Lee, P. Lee, S. Hwang, D. Kim, H. Byun, Fair contrastive learning for facial attribute classification, in: CVPR, 2022, pp. 10389– 10398
2022
-
[27]
Y. Roh, K. Lee, S. Whang, C. Suh, Fr-train: A mutual information- based approach to fair and robust training, in: ICML, PMLR, 2020, pp. 8147–8157. 23
2020
-
[28]
M. B. Zafar, I. Valera, M. G. Rogriguez, K. P. Gummadi, Fairness con- straints: Mechanisms for fair classification, in: AISTATS, PMLR, 2017, pp. 962–970
2017
-
[29]
B. H. Zhang, B. Lemoine, M. Mitchell, Mitigating unwanted biases with adversarial learning, in: AIES, 2018, pp. 335–340
2018
-
[30]
Z. Wang, X. Dong, H. Xue, Z. Zhang, W. Chiu, T. Wei, K. Ren, Fairness-aware adversarial perturbation towards bias mitigation for de- ployed deep models, in: CVPR, 2022, pp. 10379–10388
2022
-
[31]
M. P. Kim, A. Ghorbani, J. Zou, Multiaccuracy: Black-box post- processing for fairness in classification, in: AIES, 2019, pp. 247–254
2019
-
[32]
Herington, M
J. Herington, M. D. McCradden, K. Creel, R. Boellaard, E. C. Jones, A. K. Jha, A. Rahmim, P. J. Scott, J. J. Sunderland, R. L. Wahl, et al., Ethical considerations for artificial intelligence in medical imaging: de- ployment and governance, Journal of Nuclear Medicine 64 (10) (2023) 1509–1515
2023
-
[33]
Obermeyer, B
Z. Obermeyer, B. Powers, C. Vogeli, S. Mullainathan, Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations, Science 366 (6464) (2019)
2019
-
[34]
A. J. Larrazabal, N. Nieto, V. Peterson, D. H. Milone, E. Ferrante, Gen- der imbalance in medical imaging datasets produces biased classifiers for computer-aided diagnosis, National Academy of Sciences 117 (23) (2020) 12592–12594
2020
-
[35]
V. C. Nitesh, SMOTE: Synthetic minority over-sampling technique, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 16 (1) (2002) 321
2002
-
[36]
Pleiss, M
G. Pleiss, M. Raghavan, F. Wu, J. Kleinberg, K. Q. Weinberger, On fairness and calibration, in: NeurIPS, Vol. 30, 2017
2017
-
[37]
B. Kim, H. Kim, K. Kim, S. Kim, J. Kim, Learning not to learn: Train- ing deep neural networks with biased data, in: CVPR, 2019, pp. 9012– 9020
2019
-
[38]
Madras, E
D. Madras, E. Creager, T. Pitassi, R. Zemel, Learning adversarially fair and transferable representations, in: ICML, PMLR, 2018, pp. 3384– 3393. 24
2018
-
[39]
Keswani, M
V. Keswani, M. Lease, K. Kenthapadi, Towards unbiased and accurate deferral to multiple experts, in: AIES, 2021, pp. 154–165
2021
-
[40]
Narasimhan, W
H. Narasimhan, W. Jitkrittum, A. K. Menon, A. Rawat, S. Kumar, Post-hoc estimators for learning to defer to an expert, in: NeurIPS, Vol. 35, 2022
2022
-
[41]
A. Mao, C. Mohri, M. Mohri, Y. Zhong, Two-stage learning to defer with multiple experts, in: NeurIPS, 2023
2023
-
[42]
Zhang, C
Z. Zhang, C. Nguyen, K. Wells, T.-T. Do, D. Rosewarne, G. Carneiro, Coverage-constrained human-ai cooperation with multiple experts, in: AAAI, 2026
2026
-
[43]
Cortes, G
C. Cortes, G. DeSalvo, M. Mohri, Learning with rejection, in: ALT, Springer, 2016
2016
-
[44]
Charoenphakdee, Z
N. Charoenphakdee, Z. Cui, Y. Zhang, M. Sugiyama, Classification with rejection based on cost-sensitive classification, in: ICML, PMLR, 2021, pp. 1507–1517
2021
-
[45]
Raghu, K
M. Raghu, K. Blumer, G. Corrado, J. Kleinberg, Z. Obermeyer, S. Mul- lainathan, The algorithmic automation problem: Prediction, triage, and human effort, in: Machine Learning for Health Symposium, 2018
2018
-
[46]
Okati, A
N. Okati, A. De, M. Rodriguez, Differentiable learning under triage 34 (2021) 9140–9151
2021
-
[47]
Mozannar, D
H. Mozannar, D. Sontag, Consistent estimators for learning to defer to an expert, in: ICML, PMLR, 2020, pp. 7076–7087
2020
-
[48]
Verma, E
R. Verma, E. Nalisnick, Calibrated learning to defer with one-vs-all classifiers, in: ICML, PMLR, 2022, pp. 22184–22202
2022
-
[49]
Mozannar, H
H. Mozannar, H. Lang, D. Wei, P. Sattigeri, S. Das, D. Sontag, Who should predict? Exact algorithms for learning to defer to humans, in: AISTATS, PMLR, 2023, pp. 10520–10545
2023
-
[50]
Charusaie, H
M.-A. Charusaie, H. Mozannar, D. Sontag, S. Samadi, Sample efficient learningofpredictorsthatcomplementhumans, in: ICML,PMLR,2022, pp. 2972–3005. 27
2022
-
[51]
Y. Cao, H. Mozannar, L. Feng, H. Wei, B. An, In defense of soft- max parametrization for calibrated and consistent learning to defer, in: NeurIPS, Vol. 36, 2024
2024
-
[52]
Straitouri, L
E. Straitouri, L. Wang, N. Okati, M. G. Rodriguez, Improving expert predictions with conformal prediction, in: ICML, PMLR, 2023, pp. 32633–32653
2023
-
[53]
S. Liu, Y. Cao, Q. Zhang, L. Feng, B. An, Mitigating underfitting in learning to defer with consistent losses, in: AISTATS, 2024
2024
-
[54]
Mozannar, A
H. Mozannar, A. Satyanarayan, D. Sontag, Teaching humans when to defer to a classifier via exemplars, in: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 36, 2022, pp. 5323–5331
2022
-
[55]
Verma, D
R. Verma, D. Barrejón, E. Nalisnick, On the calibration of learning to defer to multiple experts, in: ICML Workshop on HMCT, 2022
2022
-
[56]
Verma, D
R. Verma, D. Barrejon, E. Nalisnick, Learning to defer to multiple ex- perts: Consistent surrogate losses, confidence calibration, and conformal ensembles, in: AISTATS, PMLR, 2023, pp. 11415–11434
2023
-
[57]
Babbar, U
V. Babbar, U. Bhatt, A. Weller, On the utility of prediction sets in human-AI teams, in: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intel- ligence, 2022
2022
-
[58]
A. Mao, M. Mohri, Y. Zhong, Principled approaches for learning to defer with multiple experts, in: International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, 2024
2024
-
[59]
Hemmer, L
P. Hemmer, L. Thede, M. Vössing, J. Jakubik, N. Kühl, Learning to defer with limited expert predictions, in: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 37, 2023, pp. 6002–6011
2023
-
[60]
Tailor, A
D. Tailor, A. Patra, R. Verma, P. Manggala, E. Nalisnick, Learning to defer to a population: A meta-learning approach, in: AISTATS, 2024
2024
-
[61]
Leitão, P
D. Leitão, P. Saleiro, M. A. Figueiredo, P. Bizarro, Human-AI collabora- tion in decision-making: Beyond learning to defer, in: ICML Workshop on Human-Machine Collaboration and Teaming, 2022. 28
2022
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.