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Studying Bias in GANs Through the Lens of Race (arxiv.org)
1 point by pajop on Feb 24, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They trained image generators on datasets with different racial mixes and checked the faces that came out. The generated faces matched each training set's mix, but a common trick for sharpening images made the imbalance worse.

Abstract · Studying Bias in GANs through the Lens of Race

In this work, we study how the performance and evaluation of generative image models are impacted by the racial composition of their training datasets. By examining and controlling the racial distributions in various training datasets, we are able to observe the impacts of different training distributions on generated image quality and the racial distributions of the generated images. Our results show that the racial compositions of generated images successfully preserve that of the training data. However, we observe that truncation, a technique used to generate higher quality images during inference, exacerbates racial imbalances in the data. Lastly, when examining the relationship between image quality and race, we find that the highest perceived visual quality images of a given race come from a distribution where that race is well-represented, and that annotators consistently prefer generated images of white people over those of Black people.

Vongani H. Maluleke, Neerja Thakkar, Tim Brooks, Ethan Weber, Trevor Darrell, Alexei A. Efros, Angjoo Kanazawa, Devin Guillory
arXiv:2209.02836 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Sep 6, 2022 · updated Sep 15, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · ECCV 2022. Project Page: https://neerja.me/bias-gans/

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Also discussed: Feb 2023 (2 points, 0 comments) · Oct 2022 (2 points, 0 comments)