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 disentangled approach, on two well-known datasets, RAF-DB and CelebA. Our results indicate that: (i) data augmentation improves the accuracy of the baseline model, but this alone is unable to mitigate the bias effect; (ii) both the attribute-aware and the disentangled approaches fortified with data augmentation perform better than the baseline approach in terms of accuracy and fairness; (iii) the disentangled approach is the best for mitigating demographic bias; and (iv) the bias mitigation strategies are more suitable in the existence of uneven attribute distribution or imbalanced number of subgroup data.
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）
Deep neural networks have proved hugely successful, achieving human-like performance on a variety of tasks. However, they are also computationally expensive, which has motivated the development of model compression techniques which reduce the resource consumption associated with deep learning models. Nevertheless, recent studies have suggested that model compression can have an adverse effect on algorithmic fairness, amplifying existing biases in machine learning models. With this project we aim to extend those studies to the context of facial expression recognition. To do that, we set up a ne…
Fairness has become increasingly pivotal in facial recognition. Without bias mitigation, deploying unfair AI would harm the interest of the underprivileged population. In this paper, we observe that though the higher accuracy that features from the deeper layer of a neural networks generally offer, fairness conditions deteriorate as we extract features from deeper layers. This phenomenon motivates us to extend the concept of multi-exit framework. Unlike existing works mainly focusing on accuracy, our multi-exit framework is fairness-oriented, where the internal classifiers are trained to be mo…
Vienna University of Technology（维也纳技术大学）；University of Alicante（阿利坎特大学）
As the privacy risks posed by camera surveillance and facial recognition have grown, so has the research into privacy preservation algorithms. Among these, visual privacy preservation algorithms attempt to impart bodily privacy to subjects in visuals by obfuscating privacy-sensitive areas. While disparate performances of facial recognition systems across phenotypes are the subject of much study, its counterpart, privacy preservation, is not commonly analysed from a fairness perspective. In this paper, the fairness of commonly used visual privacy preservation algorithms is investigated through …
Accuracy and Fairness of Facial Recognition Technology in Low-Quality Police Images: An Experiment With Synthetic Faces
Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania（犯罪学系，宾夕法尼亚大学）；Department of Statistics and Data Science, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania（统计与数据科学系，沃顿商学院，宾夕法尼亚大学）；Computer Science, School of Engineering & Applied Science, University of Pennsylvania（计算机科学，工程与应用科学学院，宾夕法尼亚大学）
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…
Recently, different researchers have found that the gallery composition of a face database can induce performance differentials to facial identification systems in which a probe image is compared against up to all stored reference images to reach a biometric decision. This negative effect is referred to as "watchlist imbalance effect". In this work, we present a method to theoretically estimate said effect for a biometric identification system given its verification performance across demographic groups and the composition of the used gallery. Further, we report results for identification expe…
School of Computing Wichita State University（威奇托州立大学计算机学院）
A number of studies suggest bias of the face biometrics, i.e., face recognition and soft-biometric estimation methods, across gender, race, and age groups. There is a recent urge to investigate the bias of different biometric modalities toward the deployment of fair and trustworthy biometric solutions. Ocular biometrics has obtained increased attention from academia and industry due to its high accuracy, security, privacy, and ease of use in mobile devices. A recent study in $2020$ also suggested the fairness of ocular-based user recognition across males and females. This paper aims to evaluat…
Face recognition is a long standing challenge in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal is to create systems that accurately detect, recognize, verify, and understand human faces. There are significant technical hurdles in making these systems accurate, particularly in unconstrained settings due to confounding factors related to pose, resolution, illumination, occlusion, and viewpoint. However, with recent advances in neural networks, face recognition has achieved unprecedented accuracy, largely built on data-driven deep learning methods. While this is encouraging, a critical aspe…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Machine learning models automatically learn discriminative features from the data, and are therefore susceptible to learn strongly-correlated biases, such as using protected attributes like gender and race. Most existing bias mitigation approaches aim to explicitly reduce the model's focus on these protected features. In this work, we propose to mitigate bias by explicitly guiding the model's focus towards task-relevant features using domain knowledge, and we hypothesize that this can indirectly reduce the dependence of the model on spurious correlations it learns from the data. We explore bia…
Rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems amplify many concerns in society. These AI algorithms inherit different biases from humans due to mysterious operational flow and because of that it is becoming adverse in usage. As a result, researchers have started to address the issue by investigating deeper in the direction towards Responsible and Explainable AI. Among variety of applications of AI, facial expression recognition might not be the most important one, yet is considered as a valuable part of human-AI interaction. Evolution of facial expression recognition from the featu…
In this paper, we introduce FairFaceGAN, a fairness-aware facial Image-to-Image translation model, mitigating the problem of unwanted translation in protected attributes (e.g., gender, age, race) during facial attributes editing. Unlike existing models, FairFaceGAN learns fair representations with two separate latents - one related to the target attributes to translate, and the other unrelated to them. This strategy enables FairFaceGAN to separate the information about protected attributes and that of target attributes. It also prevents unwanted translation in protected attributes while target…
FG 2025 TrustFAA: the First Workshop on Towards Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis: Advancing Insights of Fairness, Explainability, and Safety (TrustFAA)
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
We evaluated whether model explanations could efficiently detect bias in image classification by highlighting discriminating features, thereby removing the reliance on sensitive attributes for fairness calculations. To this end, we formulated important characteristics for bias detection and observed how explanations change as the degree of bias in models change. The paper identifies strengths and best practices for detecting bias using explanations, as well as three main weaknesses: explanations poorly estimate the degree of bias, could potentially introduce additional bias into the analysis, …
USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering（南加州大学明谢电气工程与计算机工程系）；USC Information Sciences Institute（南加州大学信息科学研究所）；Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory（视觉智能与多媒体分析实验室）
As the social impact of visual recognition has been under scrutiny, several protected-attribute balanced datasets emerged to address dataset bias in imbalanced datasets. However, in facial attribute classification, dataset bias stems from both protected attribute level and facial attribute level, which makes it challenging to construct a multi-attribute-level balanced real dataset. To bridge the gap, we propose an effective pipeline to generate high-quality and sufficient facial images with desired facial attributes and supplement the original dataset to be a balanced dataset at both levels, w…
This paper tackles face recognition in videos employing metric learning methods and similarity ranking models. The paper compares the use of the Siamese network with contrastive loss and Triplet Network with triplet loss implementing the following architectures: Google/Inception architecture, 3D Convolutional Network (C3D), and a 2-D Long short-term memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Network. We make use of still images and sequences from videos for training the networks and compare the performances implementing the above architectures. The dataset used was the YouTube Face Database designed for i…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Facial analysis systems have been deployed by large companies and critiqued by scholars and activists for the past decade. Many existing algorithmic audits examine the performance of these systems on later stage elements of facial analysis systems like facial recognition and age, emotion, or perceived gender prediction; however, a core component to these systems has been vastly understudied from a fairness perspective: face detection, sometimes called face localization. Since face detection is a pre-requisite step in facial analysis systems, the bias we observe in face detection will flow down…
Some Optimizers are More Equal: Understanding the Role of Optimizers in Group Fairness
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University（皇后大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学计算机科学与技术系）
Investigating Identity Signals in Conversational Facial Dynamics via Disentangled Expression Features
1 Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zurich , Zurich, Switzerland 2 UZH Digital Society Initiative 3 Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland 4 \'E cole Polytechnique F \'e d \'e rale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
TrustSkin: A Fairness Pipeline for Trustworthy Facial Affect Analysis Across Skin Tone
Departamento de Física, Universidad de Tarapacá（物理系，塔拉帕卡大学）；Departamento de Ciencia de la Computación, Facultad de Ingeniería, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（计算机科学系，工程学院，智利天主教大学）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Binghamton University（宾汉姆顿大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
As Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems become integrated into our daily lives, these systems need to prioritise making fair decisions instead of aiming at higher individual accuracy scores. Ranging from surveillance systems to diagnosing mental and emotional health conditions of individuals, these systems need to balance the accuracy vs fairness trade-off to make decisions that do not unjustly discriminate against specific under-represented demographic groups. Identifying bias as a critical problem in facial analysis systems, different methods have been proposed that aim to mitigate bi…
Some software solutions used to obtain the facial transformations can help investigating the artistic metamorphosis of the ancient portraits of the same person. An analysis with a freely available software of portraitures of Julius Caesar is proposed, showing his several "morphs". The software helps enhancing the mood the artist added to a portrait.
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）
As facial recognition systems are deployed more widely, scholars and activists have studied their biases and harms. Audits are commonly used to accomplish this and compare the algorithmic facial recognition systems' performance against datasets with various metadata labels about the subjects of the images. Seminal works have found discrepancies in performance by gender expression, age, perceived race, skin type, etc. These studies and audits often examine algorithms which fall into two categories: academic models or commercial models. We present a detailed comparison between academic and comme…
Learning visual representation of high quality is essential for image classification. Recently, a series of contrastive representation learning methods have achieved preeminent success. Particularly, SupCon outperformed the dominant methods based on cross-entropy loss in representation learning. However, we notice that there could be potential ethical risks in supervised contrastive learning. In this paper, we for the first time analyze unfairness caused by supervised contrastive learning and propose a new Fair Supervised Contrastive Loss (FSCL) for fair visual representation learning. Inherit…
Face4FairShifts: A Large Image Benchmark for Fairness and Robust Learning across Visual Domains
School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University（天津大学新媒体与传播学院）；Department of Computer Science, Baylor University（贝勒大学计算机科学系）；Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学电子工程与计算机科学系）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）；School of Computing, Southern Illinois University（南伊利诺伊大学计算机学院）
A Deep Learning Approach for Facial Attribute Manipulation and Reconstruction in Surveillance and Reconnaissance
Department of Networks and Digital Media（网络与数字媒体系）；Kingston University（金史密斯大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；University of Westminster（威斯敏斯特大学）
Recent research has questioned the fairness of face-based recognition and attribute classification methods (such as gender and race) for dark-skinned people and women. Ocular biometrics in the visible spectrum is an alternate solution over face biometrics, thanks to its accuracy, security, robustness against facial expression, and ease of use in mobile devices. With the recent COVID-19 crisis, ocular biometrics has a further advantage over face biometrics in the presence of a mask. However, fairness of ocular biometrics has not been studied till now. This first study aims to explore the fairne…
Bogazici University（博阿齐奇大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
As affective robots become integral in human life, these agents must be able to fairly evaluate human affective expressions without discriminating against specific demographic groups. Identifying bias in Machine Learning (ML) systems as a critical problem, different approaches have been proposed to mitigate such biases in the models both at data and algorithmic levels. In this work, we propose Continual Learning (CL) as an effective strategy to enhance fairness in Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems, guarding against biases arising from imbalances in data distributions. We compare diff…
TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；Carl Zeiss Meditec AG（卡尔蔡司医疗技术股份公司）
The performance of deep neural networks for image recognition tasks such as predicting a smiling face is known to degrade with under-represented classes of sensitive attributes. We address this problem by introducing fairness-aware regularization losses based on batch estimates of Demographic Parity, Equalized Odds, and a novel Intersection-over-Union measure. The experiments performed on facial and medical images from CelebA, UTKFace, and the SIIM-ISIC melanoma classification challenge show the effectiveness of our proposed fairness losses for bias mitigation as they improve model fairness wh…
Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions
International Hellenic University（国际希腊大学）；Democritus University of Thrace（德谟克利特大学）；Kingston University London（伦敦金斯顿大学）；University of Western Macedonia（西马其顿大学）
Capturing Dynamics: The 4D Facial Expression Intensity Dataset
École Centrale Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LS2N（LS2N实验室）；Nantes Université（南特大学）；CAPACITÉS SAS（CAPACITÉS公司）；Institut universitaire de France (IUF)（法国大学研究院）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
