Enforcing Conditional Independence for Fair Representation Learning and Causal Image Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hwa, Jensen, Zhao, Qingyu, Lahiri, Aditya, Masood, Adnan, Salimi, Babak, Adeli, Ehsan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Hwa, Jensen
Zhao, Qingyu
Lahiri, Aditya
Masood, Adnan
Salimi, Babak
Adeli, Ehsan
author_facet Hwa, Jensen
Zhao, Qingyu
Lahiri, Aditya
Masood, Adnan
Salimi, Babak
Adeli, Ehsan
contents Conditional independence (CI) constraints are critical for defining and evaluating fairness in machine learning, as well as for learning unconfounded or causal representations. Traditional methods for ensuring fairness either blindly learn invariant features with respect to a protected variable (e.g., race when classifying sex from face images) or enforce CI relative to the protected attribute only on the model output (e.g., the sex label). Neither of these methods are effective in enforcing CI in high-dimensional feature spaces. In this paper, we focus on a nascent approach characterizing the CI constraint in terms of two Jensen-Shannon divergence terms, and we extend it to high-dimensional feature spaces using a novel dynamic sampling strategy. In doing so, we introduce a new training paradigm that can be applied to any encoder architecture. We are able to enforce conditional independence of the diffusion autoencoder latent representation with respect to any protected attribute under the equalized odds constraint and show that this approach enables causal image generation with controllable latent spaces. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve high accuracy on downstream tasks while upholding equality of odds.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_13798
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enforcing Conditional Independence for Fair Representation Learning and Causal Image Generation
Hwa, Jensen
Zhao, Qingyu
Lahiri, Aditya
Masood, Adnan
Salimi, Babak
Adeli, Ehsan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Conditional independence (CI) constraints are critical for defining and evaluating fairness in machine learning, as well as for learning unconfounded or causal representations. Traditional methods for ensuring fairness either blindly learn invariant features with respect to a protected variable (e.g., race when classifying sex from face images) or enforce CI relative to the protected attribute only on the model output (e.g., the sex label). Neither of these methods are effective in enforcing CI in high-dimensional feature spaces. In this paper, we focus on a nascent approach characterizing the CI constraint in terms of two Jensen-Shannon divergence terms, and we extend it to high-dimensional feature spaces using a novel dynamic sampling strategy. In doing so, we introduce a new training paradigm that can be applied to any encoder architecture. We are able to enforce conditional independence of the diffusion autoencoder latent representation with respect to any protected attribute under the equalized odds constraint and show that this approach enables causal image generation with controllable latent spaces. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve high accuracy on downstream tasks while upholding equality of odds.
title Enforcing Conditional Independence for Fair Representation Learning and Causal Image Generation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13798