Computer vision models have been shown to exhibit and amplify biases across a wide array of datasets and tasks. Existing methods for quantifying bias in classification models primarily focus on dataset distribution and model performance on subgroups, overlooking the internal workings of a model. We introduce the Attention-IoU (Attention Intersection over Union) metric and related scores, which use attention maps to reveal biases within a model’s internal representations and identify image features potentially causing the biases. First, we validate Attention-IoU on the synthetic Waterbirds dataset, showing that the metric accurately measures model bias. We then analyze the CelebA dataset, finding that Attention-IoU uncovers correlations beyond accuracy disparities. Through an investigation of individual attributes through the protected attribute of Male, we examine the distinct ways biases are represented in CelebA. Lastly, by subsampling the training set to change attribute correlations, we demonstrate that Attention-IoU reveals potential confounding variables not present in dataset labels. Our code is available at https://github.com/aaronserianni/attention-iou.

Concept-based interpretability methods aim to explain a deep neural network model's components and predictions using a pre-defined set of semantic concepts. These methods evaluate a trained model on a new, “probe” dataset and correlate the model's outputs with concepts labeled in that dataset. Despite their popularity, they suffer from limitations that are not well-understood and articulated in the literature. In this work, we identify and analyze three commonly overlooked factors in concept-based explanations. First, we find that the choice of the probe dataset has a profound impact on the generated explanations. Our analysis reveals that different probe datasets lead to very different explanations, suggesting that the generated explanations are not generalizable outside the probe dataset. Second, we find that concepts in the probe dataset are often harder to learn than the target classes they are used to explain, calling into question the correctness of the explanations. We argue that only easily learnable concepts should be used in concept-based explanations. Finally, while existing methods use hundreds or even thousands of concepts, our human studies reveal a much stricter upper bound of 32 concepts or less, beyond which the explanations are much less practically useful. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide suggestions for future development of concept-based interpretability methods. Code for our analysis and user interface can be found at https://github.com/princetonvisualai/OverlookedFactors

Gender biases are known to exist within large-scale visual datasets and can be reflected or even amplified in downstream models. Many prior works have proposed methods for mitigating gender biases, often by attempting to remove gender expression information from images. To understand the feasibility and practicality of these approaches, we investigate what "gender artifacts" exist in large-scale visual datasets. We define a "gender artifact" as a visual cue correlated with gender, focusing specifically on cues that are learnable by a modern image classifier and have an interpretable human corollary. Through our analyses, we find that gender artifacts are ubiquitous in the COCO and OpenImages datasets, occurring everywhere from low-level information (e.g., the mean value of the color channels) to higher-level image composition (e.g., pose and location of people). Further, bias mitigation methods that attempt to remove gender actually remove more information from the scene than the person. Given the prevalence of gender artifacts, we claim that attempts to remove these artifacts from such datasets are largely infeasible as certain removed artifacts may be necessary for the downstream task of object recognition. Instead, the responsibility lies with researchers and practitioners to be aware that the distribution of images within datasets is highly gendered and hence develop fairness-aware methods which are robust to these distributional shifts across groups.

Current dataset collection methods typically scrape large amounts of data from the web. While this technique is extremely scalable, data collected in this way tends to reinforce stereotypical biases, can contain personally identifiable information, and typically originates from Europe and North America. In this work, we rethink the dataset collection paradigm and introduce GeoDE, a geographically diverse dataset with 61,940 images from 40 classes and 6 world regions, and no personally identifiable information, collected by soliciting images from people across the world. We analyse GeoDE to understand differences in images collected in this manner compared to web-scraping. Despite the smaller size of this dataset, we demonstrate its use as both an evaluation and training dataset, allowing us to highlight shortcomings in current models, as well as demonstrate improved performance even when training on this small dataset. We release the full dataset and code at https://geodiverse-data-collection.cs.princeton.edu/

Fairness in visual recognition is becoming a prominent and critical topic of discussion as recognition systems are deployed at scale in the real world. Models trained from data in which target labels are correlated with protected attributes (e.g., gender, race) are known to learn and exploit those correlations. In this work, we introduce a method for training accurate target classifiers while mitigating biases that stem from these correlations. We use GANs to generate realistic-looking images, and perturb these images in the underlying latent space to generate training data that is balanced for each protected attribute. We augment the original dataset with this generated data, and empirically demonstrate that target classifiers trained on the augmented dataset exhibit a number of both quantitative and qualitative benefits. We conduct a thorough evaluation across multiple target labels and protected attributes in the CelebA dataset, and provide an in-depth analysis and comparison to existing literature in the space. Code can be found at https://github.com/princetonvisualai/gan-debiasing.