Debiased Multimodal Personality Understanding through Dual Causal Intervention
Abstract
Multimodal personality understanding plays a critical role in human-centered artificial intelligence. Previous work mainly focus on learning rich multimodal representations for video personality understanding. However, they often suffer from potential harm caused by subject bias (e.g., observable age and unobservable mental states), as subjects originate from diverse demographic backgrounds. Learning such spurious associations between multimodal features and traits may lead to unfair personality understanding. In this work, we construct a Structural Causal Model (SCM) to analyze the impact of these biases from a causal perspective, and propose a novel Dual Causal Adjustment Network (DCAN) to mitigate the interference of subject attributes on personality understanding. Specifically, we design a Back-door Adjustment Causal Learning (BACL) module to block spurious correlations from observable demographic factors via a prototype-based confounder dictionary, and subsequently apply a Front-door Adjustment Causal Learning (FACL) module to address latent and unobservable biases through a learned mediator dictionary intervention, thereby achieving causal disentanglement of representations for deconfounded reasoning. Importantly, we construct a Demographic-annotated Multimodal Student Personality (DMSP) dataset to support the analysis and discussion of fairness-related factors. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset CFI-V2 and our DMSP dataset demonstrate that DCAN consistently improves prediction accuracy, reaching 92.11% and 92.90%, respectively. Meanwhile, the improvements in the fairness metrics of equal opportunity and demographic parity are 6.57% and 7.97% on CFI-V2, and 15.38% and 20.06% on the DMSP dataset. Our code and DMSP dataset are available at https://github.com/Sabrina-han/DCAN
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yu-An Liu 0028 | 42 | 60 Black-box Adversarial Attacks against Dense Retrieval Models: A Multi-view Contrastive Learning Method (2023) Robustness and Adversarial IR 60 Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-Box Neural Ranking Models (2025) Robustness and Adversarial IR 60 Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-Distribution Perspective (2026) Robustness and Adversarial IR |
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| 2 | Shijie Wang 0002 | 38 | 68 Score-Based Generative Diffusion Models for Social Recommendations (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 60 CheatAgent: Attacking LLM-Empowered Recommender Systems via LLM Agent (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization 55 Multi-Agent Attacks for Black-Box Social Recommendations (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 43 |
Area-chair candidates (5)
| Yi R. Fung 0001 assigned | 43 | 10 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 36 | 6 papers | |
| Ziyi Ye | 33 | 14 papers | |
| Xin Xin 0003 | 32 | 10 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 32 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sruthi Gorantla | 48 | 3 | 61 CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums (2018) Social Media and User Modelling 61 Aspect-Sentiment Embeddings for Company Profiling and Employee Opinion Mining (2018) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 2 | Sunhao Dai | 46 | 3 | 61 Unifying Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods 61 Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval Systems: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2024) Bias Mitigation Methods |
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| 4 | Yu-An Liu 0028 assigned | 42 | 3 | 60 Black-box Adversarial Attacks against Dense Retrieval Models: A Multi-view Contrastive Learning Method (2023) Robustness and Adversarial IR 60 Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-Box Neural Ranking Models (2025) Robustness and Adversarial IR |
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| 5 | Hao Liu 0078 | 42 | 3 | 61 Mitigating Fine-tuning Bias: A Parameter-Efficient Debiasing Framework for Large Language Models (2026) Bias Mitigation Methods 31 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 6 | Weizhou Shen | 42 | 3 | 61 Multi-Party Conversation Modeling for Emotion Recognition (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 61 Directed Acyclic Graph Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2021) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 7 | Sara Allawati | 41 | 3 | 61 VulGen: Workshop on Vulnerabilities in Generative Systems for Information Retrieval (2026) Bias Mitigation Methods 29 A Comparative Analysis of Linguistic and Retrieval Diversity in LLM-Generated Search Queries (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 8 | Yifan Wang 0017 | 39 | 3 | 61 Improving Long-tail User CTR Prediction via Hierarchical Distribution Alignment (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods 60 Intersectional Two-sided Fairness in Recommendation (2024) Popularity Bias and Long-Tail Debiasing |
|
| 9 | Shijie Wang 0002 assigned | 38 | 3 | 68 Score-Based Generative Diffusion Models for Social Recommendations (2025) Social Media and User Modelling 60 CheatAgent: Attacking LLM-Empowered Recommender Systems via LLM Agent (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
|
| 10 | Jimeng Sun 0001 | 37 | 3 | 66 Patent partner recommendation in enterprise social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling 61 Confluence: conformity influence in large social networks (2013) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 11 | Jizhi Zhang | 37 | 3 | 60 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization 49 Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation (2023) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 12 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 37 | 3 | 60 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization 34 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 13 | Zechun Niu | 37 | 3 | 39 Distributionally Robust Optimization for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank 37 Addressing Personalized Bias for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2025) Unbiased Learning to Rank |
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| 15 | Lingling Yi | 36 | 3 | 61 WeSeer: Visual Analysis for Better Information Cascade Prediction of WeChat Articles (2020) Social Media and User Modelling 36 Addressing Confounding Feature Issue for Causal Recommendation (2023) Explainable and Causal Recommendation |
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| 16 | Chongming Gao | 35 | 3 | 37 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling 36 Alleviating Matthew Effect of Offline Reinforcement Learning in Interactive Recommendation (2023) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation |
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| 17 | Theresia Veronika Rampisela | 35 | 3 | 35 Measuring Individual User Fairness with User Similarity and Effectiveness Disparity (2026) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation 35 Evaluation Measures of Individual Item Fairness for Recommender Systems: A Critical Study (2025) Fairness Metrics and Evaluation |
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| 18 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 35 | 3 | 38 Bilateral Self-unbiased Learning from Biased Implicit Feedback (2022) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation 38 Dual Unbiased Recommender Learning for Implicit Feedback (2021) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation |
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| 19 | Jialong Wu 0007 | 34 | 3 | 61 Causal Prompting: Debiasing Large Language Model Prompting Based on Front-Door Adjustment (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods 36 PROPER: A Progressive Learning Framework for Personalized Large Language Models with Group-Level Adaptation (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 20 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 34 | 3 | 39 LLM Personalization: Foundations, Breakthroughs, and Frontiers (2026) User Profile and Persona Modeling 39 AlpsBench: An LLM Personalization Benchmark for Real-Dialogue Memorization and Preference Alignment (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 21 | James Caverlee | 34 | 3 | 65 Learning Geo-Social User Topical Profiles with Bayesian Hierarchical User Factorization (2018) Social Media and User Modelling 38 Quantifying and Mitigating Popularity Bias in Conversational Recommender Systems (2022) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 22 | Andrew Parry | 34 | 3 | 60 Analyzing Adversarial Attacks on Sequence-to-Sequence Relevance Models (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR 60 Axiomatic Guidance for Efficient and Controlled Neural Search (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR |
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| 24 | Xinhang Li 0001 | 33 | 3 | 61 Conditional Cross-Platform User Engagement Prediction (2024) Social Media and User Modelling 32 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 25 | Yang Song 0008 | 33 | 3 | 35 LabelCraft: Empowering Short Video Recommendations with Automated Label Crafting (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 34 UniSAR: Modeling User Transition Behaviors between Search and Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 26 | Jianling Wang | 32 | 3 | 39 Quantifying and Mitigating Popularity Bias in Conversational Recommender Systems (2022) Conversational Recommendation Systems 37 Enhancing User Personalization in Conversational Recommenders (2023) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation |
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| 27 | Jin Chen 0008 | 32 | 3 | 37 Cooperative Retriever and Ranker in Deep Recommenders (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 36 Understanding the Effect of Loss Functions on the Generalization of Recommendations (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 28 | Keqin Bao | 32 | 3 | 60 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization 49 Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation (2023) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 29 | Bo Chen 0023 | 32 | 3 | 38 Towards efficient and effective unlearning of large language models for recommendation (2025) Efficiency and Deployment 35 A Comprehensive Survey on Automated Machine Learning for Recommendations (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 30 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 32 | 3 | 36 UniSAR: Modeling User Transition Behaviors between Search and Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 36 Benefit from Rich: Tackling Search Interaction Sparsity in Search Enhanced Recommendation (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 31 | Hyunsik Yoo | 32 | 3 | 35 Embracing Plasticity: Balancing Stability and Plasticity in Continual Recommender Systems (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 35 Continual Recommender Systems (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 32 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 32 | 3 | 36 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 35 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 33 | Huifeng Guo | 32 | 3 | 37 Prompt Tuning as User Inherent Profile Inference Machine (2025) Efficiency and Deployment 36 Personalize Before Retrieve: LLM-based Personalized Query Expansion for User-Centric Retrieval (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG |