A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Improving the Fairness of Image Classification Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yang, Junjie, Jiang, Jiajun, Sun, Zeyu, Chen, Junjie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Yang, Junjie
Jiang, Jiajun
Sun, Zeyu
Chen, Junjie
author_facet Yang, Junjie
Jiang, Jiajun
Sun, Zeyu
Chen, Junjie
contents Fairness has been a critical issue that affects the adoption of deep learning models in real practice. To improve model fairness, many existing methods have been proposed and evaluated to be effective in their own contexts. However, there is still no systematic evaluation among them for a comprehensive comparison under the same context, which makes it hard to understand the performance distinction among them, hindering the research progress and practical adoption of them. To fill this gap, this paper endeavours to conduct the first large-scale empirical study to comprehensively compare the performance of existing state-of-the-art fairness improving techniques. Specifically, we target the widely-used application scenario of image classification, and utilized three different datasets and five commonly-used performance metrics to assess in total 13 methods from diverse categories. Our findings reveal substantial variations in the performance of each method across different datasets and sensitive attributes, indicating over-fitting on specific datasets by many existing methods. Furthermore, different fairness evaluation metrics, due to their distinct focuses, yield significantly different assessment results. Overall, we observe that pre-processing methods and in-processing methods outperform post-processing methods, with pre-processing methods exhibiting the best performance. Our empirical study offers comprehensive recommendations for enhancing fairness in deep learning models. We approach the problem from multiple dimensions, aiming to provide a uniform evaluation platform and inspire researchers to explore more effective fairness solutions via a set of implications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_03695
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Improving the Fairness of Image Classification Models
Yang, Junjie
Jiang, Jiajun
Sun, Zeyu
Chen, Junjie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Fairness has been a critical issue that affects the adoption of deep learning models in real practice. To improve model fairness, many existing methods have been proposed and evaluated to be effective in their own contexts. However, there is still no systematic evaluation among them for a comprehensive comparison under the same context, which makes it hard to understand the performance distinction among them, hindering the research progress and practical adoption of them. To fill this gap, this paper endeavours to conduct the first large-scale empirical study to comprehensively compare the performance of existing state-of-the-art fairness improving techniques. Specifically, we target the widely-used application scenario of image classification, and utilized three different datasets and five commonly-used performance metrics to assess in total 13 methods from diverse categories. Our findings reveal substantial variations in the performance of each method across different datasets and sensitive attributes, indicating over-fitting on specific datasets by many existing methods. Furthermore, different fairness evaluation metrics, due to their distinct focuses, yield significantly different assessment results. Overall, we observe that pre-processing methods and in-processing methods outperform post-processing methods, with pre-processing methods exhibiting the best performance. Our empirical study offers comprehensive recommendations for enhancing fairness in deep learning models. We approach the problem from multiple dimensions, aiming to provide a uniform evaluation platform and inspire researchers to explore more effective fairness solutions via a set of implications.
title A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Improving the Fairness of Image Classification Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03695