Generating synthetic datasets via large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to improve LLM performance. However, LLMs inherently reflect biases in their training data, leading to a critical challenge: when models are trained on synthetic data, they may propagate and amplify the inherent biases that can significantly impact fairness and robustness on downstream tasks-a phenomenon we term bias inheritance. This work presents the first systematic investigation in understanding, analyzing, and mitigating bias inheritance. We fine-tune LLMs with a combined dataset of real and LLM-augmented data with varied bias ratio as the proportion of augmented data. Through systematic experiments across 10 classification and generation tasks, we analyze how 6 different types of biases manifest. Our results indicate that bias inheritance harms downstream task performance in bias directly-related classification and generation tasks. Then, our analysis identifies three key misalignment factors: misalignment of values, group data, and data distributions. Based on these insights, we propose three mitigation strategies: token-based, mask-based, and loss-based approaches, which can work differently on various tasks and bias, indicating the substantial challenges to mitigate bias inheritance. We hope this work can provide insights to the research of LLM data augmentation.
Personal protective equipment (PPE) is critical for ensuring the safety of construction workers. However, site surveillance images from construction sites often feature multi-size and multi-scale targets, leading to low detection accuracy for PPE in existing models. To address this issue, this paper proposes an improved model based on YOLOv8n.By enriching feature diversity and enhancing the model's adaptability to geometric transformations, the detection accuracy is improved.A Multi-Scale Group Convolution Module (MSGP) was designed to extract multi-level features using different convolution kernels. A Multi-Scale Feature Diffusion Pyramid Network (MFDPN) was developed, which aggregates multi-scale features through the Multiscale Feature Focus (MFF) module and diffuses them across scales, providing each scale with detailed contextual information. A customized Task Alignment Module was introduced to integrate interactive features, optimizing both classification and localization tasks. The DCNV2(Deformable Convolutional Networks v2) module was incorporated to handle geometric scale transformations by generating spatial offsets and feature masks from interactive features, thereby improving localization accuracy and dynamically selecting weights to enhance classification precision.The improved model incorporates rich multi-level and multi-scale features, allowing it to better adapt to tasks involving geometric transformations and aligning with the image data distribution in construction scenarios. Additionally, structured pruning techniques were applied to the model at varying levels, further reducing computational and parameter loads. Experimental results indicate that at a pruning level of 1.5, mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 improved by 3.9% and 4.6%, respectively, while computational load decreased by 21% and parameter count dropped by 53%. The proposed MFD-YOLO(1.5) model achieves significant progress in detecting personal protective equipment on construction sites, with a substantial reduction in parameter count, making it suitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices.
The tropospheric NO2 vertical column density (VCD) in Hefei area was studied with groud-based MAX-DOAS data from August 2013 to July 2014. It is shown that tropospheric NO2 VCD season mean and month mean values changed greatly. The maximum value was in the winter while the minimum value was in the summer with the season mean value in winter of 2.09 X 10(16) mol.cm(-2) whihc was 2.2 times of that in the summer. The research of average diurnal variation in different seasons displayed that biggest discrepancy appeared in the afternoon. Comparison between MAX-DOAS measurements and OMI observations had been conducted and results had an good agreement, especially in cloud-free condition (R-2 =0.88). The season mean value of tropospheric NO2 VCD around Hefei area from OMI observation showed that high NO2 in Hefei was mainly from local accumulation instead of transportation.