In plain words: A new test measures how strongly an image system links social groups with traits, using pictures it learned from without labels. Systems trained on web images picked up racial, gender, and other biases, matching eight known human biases and mirroring stereotyped portrayals online.
Abstract · Image Representations Learned With Unsupervised Pre-Training Contain Human-like Biases
Recent advances in machine learning leverage massive datasets of unlabeled images from the web to learn general-purpose image representations for tasks from image classification to face recognition. But do unsupervised computer vision models automatically learn implicit patterns and embed social biases that could have harmful downstream effects? We develop a novel method for quantifying biased associations between representations of social concepts and attributes in images. We find that state-of-the-art unsupervised models trained on ImageNet, a popular benchmark image dataset curated from internet images, automatically learn racial, gender, and intersectional biases. We replicate 8 previously documented human biases from social psychology, from the innocuous, as with insects and flowers, to the potentially harmful, as with race and gender. Our results closely match three hypotheses about intersectional bias from social psychology. For the first time in unsupervised computer vision, we also quantify implicit human biases about weight, disabilities, and several ethnicities. When compared with statistical patterns in online image datasets, our findings suggest that machine learning models can automatically learn bias from the way people are stereotypically portrayed on the web.
Ryan Steed, Aylin Caliskan
arXiv:2010.15052 · cs.CY, cs.CV · submitted Oct 28, 2020 · updated Jan 27, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · 10 pages, 3 figures. Replaced example image completions of real people with completions of artificial people