Recently, concerns regarding potential biases in the underlying algorithms of many automated systems (including biometrics) have been raised. In this context, a biased algorithm produces statistically different outcomes for different groups of individuals based on certain (often protected by anti-discrimination legislation) attributes such as sex and age. While several preliminary studies investigating this matter for facial recognition algorithms do exist, said topic has not yet been addressed for vascular biometric characteristics. Accordingly, in this paper, several popular types of recognition algorithms are benchmarked to ascertain the matter for fingervein recognition. The experimental evaluation suggests lack of bias for the tested algorithms, although future works with larger datasets are needed to validate and confirm those preliminary results.
We address the problem of bias in automated face recognition and demographic attribute estimation algorithms, where errors are lower on certain cohorts belonging to specific demographic groups. We present a novel de-biasing adversarial network (DebFace) that learns to extract disentangled feature representations for both unbiased face recognition and demographics estimation. The proposed network consists of one identity classifier and three demographic classifiers (for gender, age, and race) that are trained to distinguish identity and demographic attributes, respectively. Adversarial learning…
Institute of Smart Cities（智慧城市研究所）；Public University of Navarre（纳瓦拉公立大学）
The increasing amount of applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led researchers to study the social impact of these technologies and evaluate their fairness. Unfortunately, current fairness metrics are hard to apply in multi-class multi-demographic classification problems, such as Facial Expression Recognition (FER). We propose a new set of metrics to approach these problems. Of the three metrics proposed, two focus on the representational and stereotypical bias of the dataset, and the third one on the residual bias of the trained model. These metrics combined can potentially be used…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Face quality assessment aims at estimating the utility of a face image for the purpose of recognition. It is a key factor to achieve high face recognition performances. Currently, the high performance of these face recognition systems come with the cost of a strong bias against demographic and non-demographic sub-groups. Recent work has shown that face quality assessment algorithms should adapt to the deployed face recognition system, in order to achieve highly accurate and robust quality estimations. However, this could lead to a bias transfer towards the face quality assessment leading to di…
Face recognition is known to exhibit bias - subjects in a certain demographic group can be better recognized than other groups. This work aims to learn a fair face representation, where faces of every group could be more equally represented. Our proposed group adaptive classifier mitigates bias by using adaptive convolution kernels and attention mechanisms on faces based on their demographic attributes. The adaptive module comprises kernel masks and channel-wise attention maps for each demographic group so as to activate different facial regions for identification, leading to more discriminati…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Biases inherent in both data and algorithms make the fairness of widespread machine learning (ML)-based decision-making systems less than optimal. To improve the trustfulness of such ML decision systems, it is crucial to be aware of the inherent biases in these solutions and to make them more transparent to the public and developers. In this work, we aim at providing a set of explainability tool that analyse the difference in the face recognition models' behaviors when processing different demographic groups. We do that by leveraging higher-order statistical information based on activation map…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Current face recognition systems achieve high progress on several benchmark tests. Despite this progress, recent works showed that these systems are strongly biased against demographic sub-groups. Consequently, an easily integrable solution is needed to reduce the discriminatory effect of these biased systems. Previous work mainly focused on learning less biased face representations, which comes at the cost of a strongly degraded overall recognition performance. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised fair score normalization approach that is specifically designed to reduce the effect of…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）
Face recognition (FR) systems have a growing effect on critical decision-making processes. Recent works have shown that FR solutions show strong performance differences based on the user's demographics. However, to enable a trustworthy FR technology, it is essential to know the influence of an extended range of facial attributes on FR beyond demographics. Therefore, in this work, we analyse FR bias over a wide range of attributes. We investigate the influence of 47 attributes on the verification performance of two popular FR models. The experiments were performed on the publicly available MAAD…
Hochschule Darmstadt（达姆施塔特应用科学大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
Systems incorporating biometric technologies have become ubiquitous in personal, commercial, and governmental identity management applications. Both cooperative (e.g. access control) and non-cooperative (e.g. surveillance and forensics) systems have benefited from biometrics. Such systems rely on the uniqueness of certain biological or behavioural characteristics of human beings, which enable for individuals to be reliably recognised using automated algorithms. Recently, however, there has been a wave of public and academic concerns regarding the existence of systemic bias in automated decisio…
On the Illusion of Gender Bias in Face Recognition: Explaining the Fairness Issue Through Non-demographic Attributes
Paderborn University（帕德博恩大学）；Technical University of Darmstadt（达姆施塔特技术大学）；University of Notre Dame（诺特丹大学）；Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz（美因茨约翰· Gutenberg大学）
Tencent（腾讯）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Demographic bias is a significant challenge in practical face recognition systems. Existing methods heavily rely on accurate demographic annotations. However, such annotations are usually unavailable in real scenarios. Moreover, these methods are typically designed for a specific demographic group and are not general enough. In this paper, we propose a false positive rate penalty loss, which mitigates face recognition bias by increasing the consistency of instance False Positive Rate (FPR). Specifically, we first define the instance FPR as the ratio between the number of the non-target similar…
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形研究所 IGD）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
With the widespread use of biometric systems, the demographic bias problem raises more attention. Although many studies addressed bias issues in biometric verification, there are no works that analyze the bias in presentation attack detection (PAD) decisions. Hence, we investigate and analyze the demographic bias in iris PAD algorithms in this paper. To enable a clear discussion, we adapt the notions of differential performance and differential outcome to the PAD problem. We study the bias in iris PAD using three baselines (hand-crafted, transfer-learning, and training from scratch) using the …
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Fingerprint recognition systems have been deployed globally in numerous applications including personal devices, forensics, law enforcement, banking, and national identity systems. For these systems to be socially acceptable and trustworthy, it is critical that they perform equally well across different demographic groups. In this work, we propose a formal statistical framework to test for the existence of bias (demographic differentials) in fingerprint recognition across four major demographic groups (white male, white female, black male, and black female) for two state-of-the-art (SOTA) fing…
Auditing Demographic Bias in Facial Landmark Detection for Fair Human-Robot Interaction
Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（智能人工智能部门，马德里理工大学）；Departamento de Informática y Estadística, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos（信息与统计学部门，皇家胡安·卡洛斯大学）；ELLIS Unit Madrid（马德里ELLIS单位）
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；causaLens Ltd.（causaLens有限公司）
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly being used to automate the segmentation of brain structures in magnetic resonance (MR) images for research studies. In other applications, CNN models have been shown to exhibit bias against certain demographic groups when they are under-represented in the training sets. In this work, we investigate whether CNN models for brain MR segmentation have the potential to contain sex or race bias when trained with imbalanced training sets. We train multiple instances of the FastSurferCNN model using different levels of sex imbalance in white subjec…
Demographic Bias of Expert-Level Vision-Language Foundation Models in Medical Imaging
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Washington School of Medicine（华盛顿大学医学院）
Sum of Group Error Differences: A Critical Examination of Bias Evaluation in Biometric Verification and a Dual-Metric Measure
Information Technologies Institute, CERTH（信息技术研究所（CERTH））；Freie Universität Berlin（柏林自由大学）；IDnow, Research CoE（IDnow研究中心）；Research Institute CODE, Bundeswehr University Munich（慕尼黑联邦国防军大学CODE研究所）
T2I-BiasBench: A Multi-Metric Framework for Auditing Demographic and Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Models
Department of Information Technology, Rajkiya Engineering College Banda（拉贾基亚工程学院班达信息科技系）；School of AI and Data Science, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur（印度理工学院乔普拉人工智能与数据科学学院）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Athens（雅典大学）
Deep learning-based methods have pushed the limits of the state-of-the-art in face analysis. However, despite their success, these models have raised concerns regarding their bias towards certain demographics. This bias is inflicted both by limited diversity across demographics in the training set, as well as the design of the algorithms. In this work, we investigate the demographic bias of deep learning models in face recognition, age estimation, gender recognition and kinship verification. To this end, we introduce the most comprehensive, large-scale dataset of facial images and videos to da…
Effect of Demographic Bias on Skin Lesion Classification
Fontys University of Applied Science, Venlo, The Netherlands（Fontys应用科学大学，荷兰Venlo）；Fontys University of Applied Science, Eindhoven, The Netherlands（Fontys应用科学大学，荷兰Eindhoven）；Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands（埃因霍温技术大学，荷兰Eindhoven）；IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark（哥本哈根IT大学，丹麦）
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；MPI-SWS（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；University of Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）；GESIS Cologne（GESIS科隆社会科学研究所）
Social media provide access to behavioural data at an unprecedented scale and granularity. However, using these data to understand phenomena in a broader population is difficult due to their non-representativeness and the bias of statistical inference tools towards dominant languages and groups. While demographic attribute inference could be used to mitigate such bias, current techniques are almost entirely monolingual and fail to work in a global environment. We address these challenges by combining multilingual demographic inference with post-stratification to create a more representative po…
FAIRT2V: Training-Free Debiasing for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia.（新南威尔士大学计算机科学与工程学院，澳大利亚）；State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China（南京大学新型软件技术国家重点实验室，中国）
Face image quality assessment (FIQA) attempts to improve face recognition (FR) performance by providing additional information about sample quality. Because FIQA methods attempt to estimate the utility of a sample for face recognition, it is reasonable to assume that these methods are heavily influenced by the underlying face recognition system. Although modern face recognition systems are known to perform well, several studies have found that such systems often exhibit problems with demographic bias. It is therefore likely that such problems are also present with FIQA techniques. To investiga…
Mitigating Group-Level Fairness Disparities in Federated Visual Language Models
Great Bay University（大湾大学）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）
Person-Centric Annotations of LAION-400M: Auditing Bias and Its Transfer to Models
Technical University of Munich, Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), MDSI（慕尼黑工业大学，慕尼黑机器学习中心（MCML），MDSI）；LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France（法国巴黎理工学院，巴黎电信学院，LTCI）；Helmholtz Munich（亥姆霍兹慕尼黑中心）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
BiasMap: Leveraging Cross-Attentions to Discover and Mitigate Hidden Social Biases in Text-to-Image Generation
Institute for Clarity in Documentation（清晰文档研究所）；Inria Paris-Rocquencourt（巴黎-罗克琴court研究所）；Rajiv Gandhi University（拉吉夫·甘地大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Palmer Research Laboratories（帕勒尔研究实验室）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Utah State University（犹他州立大学）
Measuring Social Bias in Vision-Language Models with Face-Only Counterfactuals from Real Photos
School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）智能科学与工程学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Ningbo University（宁波大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学信息科学与技术学院）
