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Towards Fairness in Visual Recognition: Effective Strategies for Bias Mitigation (arxiv.org)
1 point by EvgeniyZh on Nov 28, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A simple test setup compares ways to stop vision models from linking gender to the activity shown. A new training trick that works across domains beat every other approach, including the popular one that hides protected traits, and cut gender bias on face photos.

Abstract

Computer vision models learn to perform a task by capturing relevant statistics from training data. It has been shown that models learn spurious age, gender, and race correlations when trained for seemingly unrelated tasks like activity recognition or image captioning. Various mitigation techniques have been presented to prevent models from utilizing or learning such biases. However, there has been little systematic comparison between these techniques. We design a simple but surprisingly effective visual recognition benchmark for studying bias mitigation. Using this benchmark, we provide a thorough analysis of a wide range of techniques. We highlight the shortcomings of popular adversarial training approaches for bias mitigation, propose a simple but similarly effective alternative to the inference-time Reducing Bias Amplification method of Zhao et al., and design a domain-independent training technique that outperforms all other methods. Finally, we validate our findings on the attribute classification task in the CelebA dataset, where attribute presence is known to be correlated with the gender of people in the image, and demonstrate that the proposed technique is effective at mitigating real-world gender bias.

Zeyu Wang, Klint Qinami, Ioannis Christos Karakozis, Kyle Genova, Prem Nair, Kenji Hata, Olga Russakovsky
arXiv:1911.11834 · cs.CV · submitted Nov 26, 2019 · updated Apr 2, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · To appear in CVPR 2020

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I never really got the motivation for this. Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like if I am creating a neural net to recognise if someone is smiling, I should use all the information in the picture, including race and gender.