Who's in and who's out? A case study of multimodal CLIP-filtering in DataComp

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hong, Rachel, Agnew, William, Kohno, Tadayoshi, Morgenstern, Jamie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Hong, Rachel
Agnew, William
Kohno, Tadayoshi
Morgenstern, Jamie
author_facet Hong, Rachel
Agnew, William
Kohno, Tadayoshi
Morgenstern, Jamie
contents As training datasets become increasingly drawn from unstructured, uncontrolled environments such as the web, researchers and industry practitioners have increasingly relied upon data filtering techniques to "filter out the noise" of web-scraped data. While datasets have been widely shown to reflect the biases and values of their creators, in this paper we contribute to an emerging body of research that assesses the filters used to create these datasets. We show that image-text data filtering also has biases and is value-laden, encoding specific notions of what is counted as "high-quality" data. In our work, we audit a standard approach of image-text CLIP-filtering on the academic benchmark DataComp's CommonPool by analyzing discrepancies of filtering through various annotation techniques across multiple modalities of image, text, and website source. We find that data relating to several imputed demographic groups -- such as LGBTQ+ people, older women, and younger men -- are associated with higher rates of exclusion. Moreover, we demonstrate cases of exclusion amplification: not only are certain marginalized groups already underrepresented in the unfiltered data, but CLIP-filtering excludes data from these groups at higher rates. The data-filtering step in the machine learning pipeline can therefore exacerbate representation disparities already present in the data-gathering step, especially when existing filters are designed to optimize a specifically-chosen downstream performance metric like zero-shot image classification accuracy. Finally, we show that the NSFW filter fails to remove sexually-explicit content from CommonPool, and that CLIP-filtering includes several categories of copyrighted content at high rates. Our conclusions point to a need for fundamental changes in dataset creation and filtering practices.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08209
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who's in and who's out? A case study of multimodal CLIP-filtering in DataComp
Hong, Rachel
Agnew, William
Kohno, Tadayoshi
Morgenstern, Jamie
Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
As training datasets become increasingly drawn from unstructured, uncontrolled environments such as the web, researchers and industry practitioners have increasingly relied upon data filtering techniques to "filter out the noise" of web-scraped data. While datasets have been widely shown to reflect the biases and values of their creators, in this paper we contribute to an emerging body of research that assesses the filters used to create these datasets. We show that image-text data filtering also has biases and is value-laden, encoding specific notions of what is counted as "high-quality" data. In our work, we audit a standard approach of image-text CLIP-filtering on the academic benchmark DataComp's CommonPool by analyzing discrepancies of filtering through various annotation techniques across multiple modalities of image, text, and website source. We find that data relating to several imputed demographic groups -- such as LGBTQ+ people, older women, and younger men -- are associated with higher rates of exclusion. Moreover, we demonstrate cases of exclusion amplification: not only are certain marginalized groups already underrepresented in the unfiltered data, but CLIP-filtering excludes data from these groups at higher rates. The data-filtering step in the machine learning pipeline can therefore exacerbate representation disparities already present in the data-gathering step, especially when existing filters are designed to optimize a specifically-chosen downstream performance metric like zero-shot image classification accuracy. Finally, we show that the NSFW filter fails to remove sexually-explicit content from CommonPool, and that CLIP-filtering includes several categories of copyrighted content at high rates. Our conclusions point to a need for fundamental changes in dataset creation and filtering practices.
title Who's in and who's out? A case study of multimodal CLIP-filtering in DataComp
topic Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08209