No Arabic abstract
Internet search affects peoples cognition of the world, so mitigating biases in search results and learning fair models is imperative for social good. We study a unique gender bias in image search in this work: the search images are often gender-imbalanced for gender-neutral natural language queries. We diagnose two typical image search models, the specialized model trained on in-domain datasets and the generalized representation model pre-trained on massive image and text data across the internet. Both models suffer from severe gender bias. Therefore, we introduce two novel debiasing approaches: an in-processing fair sampling method to address the gender imbalance issue for training models, and a post-processing feature clipping method base on mutual information to debias multimodal representations of pre-trained models. Extensive experiments on MS-COCO and Flickr30K benchmarks show that our methods significantly reduce the gender bias in image search models.
Image captioning has made substantial progress with huge supporting image collections sourced from the web. However, recent studies have pointed out that captioning datasets, such as COCO, contain gender bias found in web corpora. As a result, learning models could heavily rely on the learned priors and image context for gender identification, leading to incorrect or even offensive errors. To encourage models to learn correct gender features, we reorganize the COCO dataset and present two new splits COCO-GB V1 and V2 datasets where the train and test sets have different gender-context joint distribution. Models relying on contextual cues will suffer from huge gender prediction errors on the anti-stereotypical test data. Benchmarking experiments reveal that most captioning models learn gender bias, leading to high gender prediction errors, especially for women. To alleviate the unwanted bias, we propose a new Guided Attention Image Captioning model (GAIC) which provides self-guidance on visual attention to encourage the model to capture correct gender visual evidence. Experimental results validate that GAIC can significantly reduce gender prediction errors with a competitive caption quality. Our codes and the designed benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/datamllab/Mitigating_Gender_Bias_In_Captioning_System.
In this work, we present a framework to measure and mitigate intrinsic biases with respect to protected variables --such as gender-- in visual recognition tasks. We show that trained models significantly amplify the association of target labels with gender beyond what one would expect from biased datasets. Surprisingly, we show that even when datasets are balanced such that each label co-occurs equally with each gender, learned models amplify the association between labels and gender, as much as if data had not been balanced! To mitigate this, we adopt an adversarial approach to remove unwanted features corresponding to protected variables from intermediate representations in a deep neural network -- and provide a detailed analysis of its effectiveness. Experiments on two datasets: the COCO dataset (objects), and the imSitu dataset (actions), show reductions in gender bias amplification while maintaining most of the accuracy of the original models.
Word embedding models have become a fundamental component in a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. However, embeddings trained on human-generated corpora have been demonstrated to inherit strong gender stereotypes that reflect social constructs. To address this concern, in this paper, we propose a novel training procedure for learning gender-neutral word embeddings. Our approach aims to preserve gender information in certain dimensions of word vectors while compelling other dimensions to be free of gender influence. Based on the proposed method, we generate a Gender-Neutral variant of GloVe (GN-GloVe). Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that GN-GloVe successfully isolates gender information without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.
Recent studies have shown that word embeddings exhibit gender bias inherited from the training corpora. However, most studies to date have focused on quantifying and mitigating such bias only in English. These analyses cannot be directly extended to languages that exhibit morphological agreement on gender, such as Spanish and French. In this paper, we propose new metrics for evaluating gender bias in word embeddings of these languages and further demonstrate evidence of gender bias in bilingual embeddings which align these languages with English. Finally, we extend an existing approach to mitigate gender bias in word embeddings under both monolingual and bilingual settings. Experiments on modified Word Embedding Association Test, word similarity, word translation, and word pair translation tasks show that the proposed approaches effectively reduce the gender bias while preserving the utility of the embeddings.
Strikingly few Nobel laureates within medicine, natural and social sciences are women. Although it is obvious that there are fewer women researchers within these fields, does this gender ratio still fully account for the low number of female Nobel laureates? We examine whether women are awarded the Nobel Prizes less often than the gender ratio suggests. Based on historical data across four scientific fields and a Bayesian hierarchical model, we quantify any possible bias. The model reveals, with exceedingly large confidence, that indeed women are strongly under-represented among Nobel laureates across all disciplines examined.