They're All Doctors: Synthesizing Diverse Counterfactuals to Mitigate Associative Bias

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Magid, Salma Abdel, Wang, Jui-Hsien, Kafle, Kushal, Pfister, Hanspeter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Magid, Salma Abdel
Wang, Jui-Hsien
Kafle, Kushal
Pfister, Hanspeter
author_facet Magid, Salma Abdel
Wang, Jui-Hsien
Kafle, Kushal
Pfister, Hanspeter
contents Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are powerful models; however they can exhibit unwanted biases, making them less safe when deployed directly in applications such as text-to-image, text-to-video retrievals, reverse search, or classification tasks. In this work, we propose a novel framework to generate synthetic counterfactual images to create a diverse and balanced dataset that can be used to fine-tune CLIP. Given a set of diverse synthetic base images from text-to-image models, we leverage off-the-shelf segmentation and inpainting models to place humans with diverse visual appearances in context. We show that CLIP trained on such datasets learns to disentangle the human appearance from the context of an image, i.e., what makes a doctor is not correlated to the person's visual appearance, like skin color or body type, but to the context, such as background, the attire they are wearing, or the objects they are holding. We demonstrate that our fine-tuned CLIP model, $CF_α$, improves key fairness metrics such as MaxSkew, MinSkew, and NDKL by 40-66\% for image retrieval tasks, while still achieving similar levels of performance in downstream tasks. We show that, by design, our model retains maximal compatibility with the original CLIP models, and can be easily controlled to support different accuracy versus fairness trade-offs in a plug-n-play fashion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_11331
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle They're All Doctors: Synthesizing Diverse Counterfactuals to Mitigate Associative Bias
Magid, Salma Abdel
Wang, Jui-Hsien
Kafle, Kushal
Pfister, Hanspeter
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are powerful models; however they can exhibit unwanted biases, making them less safe when deployed directly in applications such as text-to-image, text-to-video retrievals, reverse search, or classification tasks. In this work, we propose a novel framework to generate synthetic counterfactual images to create a diverse and balanced dataset that can be used to fine-tune CLIP. Given a set of diverse synthetic base images from text-to-image models, we leverage off-the-shelf segmentation and inpainting models to place humans with diverse visual appearances in context. We show that CLIP trained on such datasets learns to disentangle the human appearance from the context of an image, i.e., what makes a doctor is not correlated to the person's visual appearance, like skin color or body type, but to the context, such as background, the attire they are wearing, or the objects they are holding. We demonstrate that our fine-tuned CLIP model, $CF_α$, improves key fairness metrics such as MaxSkew, MinSkew, and NDKL by 40-66\% for image retrieval tasks, while still achieving similar levels of performance in downstream tasks. We show that, by design, our model retains maximal compatibility with the original CLIP models, and can be easily controlled to support different accuracy versus fairness trade-offs in a plug-n-play fashion.
title They're All Doctors: Synthesizing Diverse Counterfactuals to Mitigate Associative Bias
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11331