Learning discriminative powerful representations is a crucial step for machine learning systems. Introducing invariance against arbitrary nuisance or sensitive attributes while performing well on specific tasks is an important problem in representation learning. This is mostly approached by purging the sensitive information from learned representations. In this paper, we propose a novel disentanglement approach to invariant representation problem. We disentangle the meaningful and sensitive representations by enforcing orthogonality constraints as a proxy for independence. We explicitly enforce the meaningful representation to be agnostic to sensitive information by entropy maximization. The proposed approach is evaluated on five publicly available datasets and compared with state of the art methods for learning fairness and invariance achieving the state of the art performance on three datasets and comparable performance on the rest. Further, we perform an ablative study to evaluate the effect of each component.
Qatar Computing Research Institute（卡塔尔计算研究所）；University of Gabes（加贝斯大学）；Sidra Medicine（西德拉医院）
Patient no-shows is a major burden for health centers leading to loss of revenue, increased waiting time and deteriorated health outcome. Developing machine learning (ML) models for the prediction of no -shows could help addressing this important issue. It is crucial to consider fair ML models for no-show prediction in order to ensure equality of opportunity in accessing healthcare services. In this wo rk, we are interested in developing deep learning models for no-show prediction based on tabular data while ensuring fairness properties. Our baseline model, TabNet, uses on attentive feature tr…
Learning representations that can disentangle explanatory attributes underlying the data improves interpretabilty as well as provides control on data generation. Various learning frameworks such as VAEs, GANs and auto-encoders have been used in the literature to learn such representations. Most often, the latent space is constrained to a partitioned representation or structured by a prior to impose disentangling. In this work, we advance the use of a latent representation based on a product space of Orthogonal Spheres PrOSe. The PrOSe model is motivated by the reasoning that latent-variables r…
We introduce Constr-DRKM, a deep kernel method for the unsupervised learning of disentangled data representations. We propose augmenting the original deep restricted kernel machine formulation for kernel PCA by orthogonality constraints on the latent variables to promote disentanglement and to make it possible to carry out optimization without first defining a stabilized objective. After illustrating an end-to-end training procedure based on a quadratic penalty optimization algorithm with warm start, we quantitatively evaluate the proposed method's effectiveness in disentangled feature learnin…
Model Debiasing via Gradient-based Explanation on Representation
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Hong Kong Research Center, Huawei（华为香港研究中心）；NVIDIA Research（英伟达研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Mitigating the discrimination of machine learning models has gained increasing attention in medical image analysis. However, rare works focus on fair treatments for patients with multiple sensitive demographic ones, which is a crucial yet challenging problem for real-world clinical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method for fair representation learning with respect to multi-sensitive attributes. We pursue the independence between target and multi-sensitive representations by achieving orthogonality in the representation space. Concretely, we enforce the column space orthogonali…
From Orthogonality to Dependency: Learning Disentangled Representation for Multi-Modal Time-Series Sensing Signals
School of Computer Science, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学计算机学院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Shantou University（汕头大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Fair representation learning aims to encode invariant representation with respect to the protected attribute, such as gender or age. In this paper, we design Fairness-aware Disentangling Variational AutoEncoder (FD-VAE) for fair representation learning. This network disentangles latent space into three subspaces with a decorrelation loss that encourages each subspace to contain independent information: 1) target attribute information, 2) protected attribute information, 3) mutual attribute information. After the representation learning, this disentangled representation is leveraged for fairer …
Disentangled representations have recently been shown to improve fairness, data efficiency and generalisation in simple supervised and reinforcement learning tasks. To extend the benefits of disentangled representations to more complex domains and practical applications, it is important to enable hyperparameter tuning and model selection of existing unsupervised approaches without requiring access to ground truth attribute labels, which are not available for most datasets. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a simple yet robust and reliable method for unsupervised disentangled mod…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Université de Lille（里尔大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Centrale Lille（里尔中央理工学院）
Disentanglement is a useful property in representation learning which increases the interpretability of generative models such as Variational autoencoders (VAE), Generative Adversarial Models, and their many variants. Typically in such models, an increase in disentanglement performance is traded-off with generation quality. In the context of latent space models, this work presents a representation learning framework that explicitly promotes disentanglement by encouraging orthogonal directions of variations. The proposed objective is the sum of an autoencoder error term along with a Principal C…
Disentangled Representation Learning via Flow Matching
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University（吉林大学计算机科学与技术学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；City St George’s, University of London（伦敦大学城市圣乔治学院）；Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院系统研究所）
Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
The Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful architecture capable of representation learning and generative modeling. When it comes to learning interpretable (disentangled) representations, VAE and its variants show unparalleled performance. However, the reasons for this are unclear, since a very particular alignment of the latent embedding is needed but the design of the VAE does not encourage it in any explicit way. We address this matter and offer the following explanation: the diagonal approximation in the encoder together with the inherent stochasticity force local orthogonality of the…
Toward Robust Medical Fairness: Debiased Dual-Modal Alignment via Text-Guided Attribute-Disentangled Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models
National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology（集成空天地海大数据应用技术国家工程实验室）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Huiying Medical Technology Company Ltd.（慧影医疗技术有限公司）；The School of Computer Science（计算机学院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
University of Seoul（首尔大学）；Korea University（高丽大学）；POSTECH（浦项科技大学）
Learning fair representation is crucial for achieving fairness or debiasing sensitive information. Most existing works rely on adversarial representation learning to inject some invariance into representation. However, adversarial learning methods are known to suffer from relatively unstable training, and this might harm the balance between fairness and predictiveness of representation. We propose a new approach, learning FAir Representation via distributional CONtrastive Variational AutoEncoder (FarconVAE), which induces the latent space to be disentangled into sensitive and nonsensitive part…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
Recognition of expressions of emotions and affect from facial images is a well-studied research problem in the fields of affective computing and computer vision with a large number of datasets available containing facial images and corresponding expression labels. However, virtually none of these datasets have been acquired with consideration of fair distribution across the human population. Therefore, in this work, we undertake a systematic investigation of bias and fairness in facial expression recognition by comparing three different approaches, namely a baseline, an attribute-aware and a d…
DMMRL: Disentangled Multi-Modal Representation Learning via Variational Autoencoders for Molecular Property Prediction
Guangxi Key Lab of Human-machine Interaction and Intelligent Decision（广西人机交互与智能决策重点实验室）；Nanning Normal University（南宁师范大学）；College of Big Data and Software Engineering（大数据与软件工程学院）；Zhejiang Wanli University（浙江万里大学）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
The task of infomin learning aims to learn a representation with high utility while being uninformative about a specified target, with the latter achieved by minimising the mutual information between the representation and the target. It has broad applications, ranging from training fair prediction models against protected attributes, to unsupervised learning with disentangled representations. Recent works on infomin learning mainly use adversarial training, which involves training a neural network to estimate mutual information or its proxy and thus is slow and difficult to optimise. Drawing …
With the growing interest in the machine learning community to solve real-world problems, it has become crucial to uncover the hidden reasoning behind their decisions by focusing on the fairness and auditing the predictions made by these black-box models. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address two key issues: (a) Can we simultaneously learn fair disentangled representations while ensuring the utility of the learned representation for downstream tasks, and (b)Can we provide theoretical insights into when the proposed approach will be both fair and accurate. To address the former, w…
DiscoVL: Unveiling Disentangled C ross-Modal Representation Learning via Orthogonal Adversarial Regularization for V ision-Language Models
Shandong Artificial Intelligence Institute（山东人工智能研究院）；Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)（齐鲁工业大学（山东省科学院））；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）；University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
We consider the problem of learning representations that achieve group and subgroup fairness with respect to multiple sensitive attributes. Taking inspiration from the disentangled representation learning literature, we propose an algorithm for learning compact representations of datasets that are useful for reconstruction and prediction, but are also \emph{flexibly fair}, meaning they can be easily modified at test time to achieve subgroup demographic parity with respect to multiple sensitive attributes and their conjunctions. We show empirically that the resulting encoder---which does not re…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Tomorrow Advancing Life（好未来）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Unsupervised disentanglement learning is a crucial issue for understanding and exploiting deep generative models. Recently, SeFa tries to find latent disentangled directions by performing SVD on the first projection of a pre-trained GAN. However, it is only applied to the first layer and works in a post-processing way. Hessian Penalty minimizes the off-diagonal entries of the output's Hessian matrix to facilitate disentanglement, and can be applied to multi-layers.However, it constrains each entry of output independently, making it not sufficient in disentangling the latent directions (e.g., s…
Cross-Camera Cow Identification via Disentangled Representation Learning
College of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University（信息科学与工程学院，山东农业大学）；Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey（视觉语音与信号处理中心（CVSSP）， Surrey 大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（机器学习研究院，阿德莱德大学）
