Data powering AI is often opaque. Researchers, NGOs, and law and policy leaders have called for greater transparency about how data is used for training, fine-tuning, and evaluation. While data transparency is often championed as crucial, what it concretely enables is largely implicit. Similarly, the concerns developers seem to have about transparency go unstated. This lack of clarity has led some researchers to critique transparency demands as disconnected from the actual benefits—or risks—to specific stakeholders. We analyze documentation from four stakeholder groups to create a taxonomy of the risks and benefits of dataset transparency. Data transparency is perceived as either a risk or a benefit given a stakeholder’s position, rather than wholesale. We also propose data availability and data documentation as two lenses through which to consider transparency. We discuss how best to strategically promote situational data transparency that takes into account the relationship between stakeholder position, transparency modality, and benefits/risks.

We propose a generative agent that augments training datasets with synthetic data for model fine-tuning. Unlike prior work, which uniformly samples synthetic data, our agent iteratively generates relevant samples on-the-fly, aligning with the target distribution. It prioritizes synthetic data that complements difficult training samples, focusing on those with high variance in gradient updates. Experiments across several image classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Yusuke Hirota, Jerone Andrews, Dora Zhao, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Apostolos Modas, Yuta Nakashima, Alice Xiang. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Machine learning (ML) datasets, often perceived as neutral, inherently encapsulate abstract and disputed social constructs. Dataset curators frequently employ value-laden terms such as diversity, bias, and quality to characterize datasets. Despite their prevalence, these terms lack clear definitions and validation. Our research explores the implications of this issue by analyzing "diversity" across 135 image and text datasets. Drawing from social sciences, we apply principles from measurement theory to identify considerations and offer recommendations for conceptualizing, operationalizing, and evaluating diversity in datasets. Our findings have broader implications for ML research, advocating for a more nuanced and precise approach to handling value-laden properties in dataset construction.

Despite extensive efforts to create fairer machine learning (ML) datasets, there remains a limited understanding of the practical aspects of dataset curation. Drawing from interviews with 30 ML dataset curators, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges and trade-offs encountered throughout the dataset curation lifecycle. Our findings underscore overarching issues within the broader fairness landscape that impact data curation. We conclude with recommendations aimed at fostering systemic changes to better facilitate fair dataset curation practices.

Biases in large-scale image datasets are known to influence the performance of computer vision models as a function of geographic context. To investigate the limitations of standard Internet data collection methods in low- and middle-income countries, we analyze human-centric image geo-diversity on a massive scale using geotagged Flickr images associated with each nation in Africa. We report the quantity and content of available data with comparisons to population-matched nations in Europe as well as the distribution of data according to fine-grained intra-national wealth estimates. Temporal analyses are performed at two-year intervals to expose emerging data trends. Furthermore, we present findings for an “othering” phenomenon as evidenced by a substantial number of images from Africa being taken by non-local photographers. The results of our study suggest that further work is required to capture image data representative of African people and their environments and, ultimately, to improve the applicability of computer vision models in a global context.

This paper strives to measure apparent skin color in computer vision, beyond a unidimensional scale on skin tone. In their seminal paper Gender Shades, Buolamwini and Gebru have shown how gender classification systems can be biased against women with darker skin tones. Subsequently, fairness researchers and practitioners have adopted the Fitzpatrick skin type classification as a common measure to assess skin color bias in computer vision systems. While effective, the Fitzpatrick scale only focuses on the skin tone ranging from light to dark. Towards a more comprehensive measure of skin color, we introduce the hue angle ranging from red to yellow. When applied to images, the hue dimension reveals additional biases related to skin color in both computer vision datasets and models. We then recommend multidimensional skin color scales, relying on both skin tone and hue, for fairness assessments.

The phenomenon of $\textit{bias amplification}$ occurs when models amplify training set biases at test time. Existing metrics measure bias amplification with respect to single annotated attributes (e.g., $\texttt{computer}$). However, large-scale datasets typically consist of instances with multiple attribute annotations (e.g., $\{\texttt{computer}, \texttt{keyboard}\}$). We demonstrate models can learn to exploit correlations with respect to multiple attributes, which are not accounted for by current metrics. Moreover, we show that current metrics can give the erroneous impression that little to no bias amplification has occurred as they aggregate positive and negative bias scores. Further, these metrics lack an ideal value, making them difficult to interpret. To address these shortcomings, we propose a new metric: $\textit{Multi-Attribute Bias Amplification}$. We validate our metric's utility through a bias amplification analysis on the COCO, imSitu, and CelebA datasets. Finally, we benchmark bias mitigation methods using our proposed metric, suggesting possible avenues for future bias mitigation efforts.

Human-centric computer vision (HCCV) data curation practices often neglect privacy and bias concerns, leading to dataset retractions and unfair models. HCCV datasets constructed through nonconsensual web scraping lack crucial metadata for comprehensive fairness and robustness evaluations. Current remedies are post hoc, lack persuasive justification for adoption, or fail to provide proper contextualization for appropriate application. Our research focuses on proactive, domain-specific recommendations, covering purpose, privacy and consent, and diversity, for curating HCCV evaluation datasets, addressing privacy and bias concerns. We adopt an ante hoc reflective perspective, drawing from current practices, guidelines, dataset withdrawals, and audits, to inform our considerations and recommendations.

Speech AI Technologies are largely trained on publicly available datasets or by the massive web-crawling of speech. In both cases, data acquisition focuses on minimizing collection effort, without necessarily taking the data subjects' protection or user needs into consideration. This results to models that are not robust when used on users who deviate from the dominant demographics in the training set, discriminating individuals having different dialects, accents, speaking styles, and disfluencies. In this talk, we use automatic speech recognition as a case study and examine the properties that ethical speech datasets should possess towards responsible AI applications. We showcase diversity issues, inclusion practices, and necessary considerations that can improve trained models, while facilitating model explainability and protecting users and data subjects. We argue for the legal & privacy protection of data subjects, targeted data sampling corresponding to user demographics & needs, appropriate meta data that ensure explainability & accountability in cases of model failure, and the sociotechnical & situated model design. We hope this talk can inspire researchers & practitioners to design and use more human-centric datasets in speech technologies and other domains, in ways that empower and respect users, while improving machine learning models' robustness and utility.

Algorithmic transparency entails exposing system properties to various stakeholders for purposes that include understanding, improving, and contesting predictions. Until now, most research into algorithmic transparency has predominantly focused on explainability. Explainability attempts to provide reasons for a machine learning model's behavior to stakeholders. However, understanding a model's specific behavior alone might not be enough for stakeholders to gauge whether the model is wrong or lacks sufficient knowledge to solve the task at hand. In this paper, we argue for considering a complementary form of transparency by estimating and communicating the uncertainty associated with model predictions. First, we discuss methods for assessing uncertainty. Then, we characterize how uncertainty can be used to mitigate model unfairness, augment decision-making, and build trustworthy systems. Finally, we outline methods for displaying uncertainty to stakeholders and recommend how to collect information required for incorporating uncertainty into existing ML pipelines. This work constitutes an interdisciplinary review drawn from literature spanning machine learning, visualization/HCI, design, decision-making, and fairness. We aim to encourage researchers and practitioners to measure, communicate, and use uncertainty as a form of transparency.

Re-offense risk is considered in decision-making at many stages of the criminal justice system, from pre-trial, to sentencing, to parole. To aid decision-makers in their assessments, institutions increasingly rely on algorithmic risk assessment instruments (RAIs). These tools assess the likelihood that an individual will be arrested for a new criminal offense within some time window following their release. However, since not all crimes result in arrest, RAIs do not directly assess the risk of re-offense. Furthermore, disparities in the likelihood of arrest can potentially lead to biases in the resulting risk scores. Several recent validations of RAIs have therefore focused on arrests for violent offenses, which are viewed as being more accurate and less biased reflections of offending behavior. In this paper, we investigate biases in violent arrest data by analysing racial disparities in the likelihood of arrest for White and Black violent offenders. We focus our study on 2007--2016 incident-level data of violent offenses from 16 US states as recorded in the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Our analysis shows that the magnitude and direction of the racial disparities depend on various characteristics of the crimes. In addition, our investigation reveals large variations in arrest rates across geographical locations and offense types. We discuss the implications of the observed disconnect between re-arrest and re-offense in the context of RAIs and the challenges around the use of data from NIBRS to correct for the sampling bias.