Learning Late, Guiding Early: Timestep-Decoupled Semantic Guidance for Fair Face Generation

Abstract

Demographic imbalance in synthetic face generation can propagate to downstream face recognition systems, making fairness an important consideration when diffusion models are used for data generation. Existing fairness-aware generation approaches often require model retraining, architectural modifications, or repeated guidance throughout the reverse diffusion process. In this work, we introduce Semantic Boundary Predictor (SBP), an inference-time framework that performs demographic guidance through a one-shot intervention during reverse denoising. Our approach is motivated by the observation that latent representations at different diffusion timesteps play distinct semantic roles: late-stage latents provide stronger demographic separability, whereas early-stage latents offer greater flexibility for semantic intervention. SBP leverages this timestep decoupling by learning linear semantic boundaries from late-stage latent representations while applying them only once at the initial noisy latent, allowing the remainder of the reverse denoising process to proceed unchanged. The method requires neither retraining nor fine-tuning of the underlying Latent Diffusion Model and operates without external balanced datasets. Experiments on CelebA-HQ demonstrate substantial improvements in demographic fairness, reducing fairness disparity by 98% for gender, 95% for binary race, and 15% for four-class race, while maintaining perceptual image quality across demographic groups. Owing to its one-shot inference strategy and model-agnostic design, SBP introduces only a small computational overhead and can be readily integrated with existing pre-trained latent diffusion models.