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Turning a Blind Eye: Explicit Removal of Biases and Variation from Deep Neural Network Embeddings

  • Mohsan AlviEmail author
  • Andrew Zisserman
  • Christoffer Nellåker
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 11129)

Abstract

Neural networks achieve the state-of-the-art in image classification tasks. However, they can encode spurious variations or biases that may be present in the training data. For example, training an age predictor on a dataset that is not balanced for gender can lead to gender biased predicitons (e.g. wrongly predicting that males are older if only elderly males are in the training set). We present two distinct contributions:
  1. (1)

    An algorithm that can remove multiple sources of variation from the feature representation of a network. We demonstrate that this algorithm can be used to remove biases from the feature representation, and thereby improve classification accuracies, when training networks on extremely biased datasets.

     
  2. (2)

    An ancestral origin database of 14,000 images of individuals from East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, sub-Saharan Africa, and Western Europe. We demonstrate on this dataset, for a number of facial attribute classification tasks, that we are able to remove racial biases from the network feature representation.

     

Keywords

Dataset bias Face attribute classification Ancestral origin dataset 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This research was financially supported by the EPSRC programme grant Seebibyte EP/M013774/1, the EPSRC EP/G036861/1, and the MRC Grant MR/M014568/1.

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Copyright information

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  • Mohsan Alvi
    • 1
    Email author
  • Andrew Zisserman
    • 1
  • Christoffer Nellåker
    • 2
    • 3
  1. 1.Visual Geometry Group, Department of Engineering ScienceUniversity of OxfordOxfordUK
  2. 2.Nuffield Department of Obstetrics and GynaecologyUniversity of OxfordOxfordUK
  3. 3.Big Data InstituteUniversity of OxfordOxfordUK

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