Word embeddings learnt from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases such as gender, racial or ethnic biases, which in turn bias the down-stream NLP applications that use those word embeddings. Taking gender-bias as a working example, we propose a debiasing method that preserves non-discriminative gender-related information, while removing stereotypical discriminative gender biases from pre-trained word embeddings. Specifically, we consider four types of information: , , and , which represent the relationship between gender vs. bias, and propose a debiasing method that (a) preserves the gender-related information in feminine and masculine words, (b) preserves the neutrality in gender-neutral words, and (c) removes the biases from stereotypical words. Experimental results on several previously proposed benchmark datasets show that our proposed method can debias pre-trained word embeddings better than existing SoTA methods proposed for debiasing word embeddings while preserving gender-related but non-discriminative information.
Debiasing can be seen as a problem of information related to a attribute such as gender, for which adversarial learning methods @cite_17 @cite_5 @cite_30 have been proposed in the fairness-aware machine learning community @cite_33 . In these approaches, inputs are first encoded, and then two classifiers are trained -- a that uses the encoded input to predict the target NLP task, and a that uses the encoded input to predict the protected attribute. The two classifiers and the encoder is learnt jointly such that the accuracy of the target task predictor is maximised, while minimising the accuracy of the protected-attribute predictor. However, showed that although it is possible to obtain chance-level development-set accuracy for the protected attribute during training, a post-hoc classifier, trained on the encoded inputs can still manage to reach substantially high accuracies for the protected attributes. They conclude that adversarial learning alone does not guarantee invariant representations for the protected attributes.
@cite_30 @cite_5 @cite_33 @cite_17
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How can we learn a classifier that is "fair" for a protected or sensitive group, when we do not know if the input to the classifier belongs to the protected group? How can we train such a classifier when data on the protected group is difficult to attain? In many settings, finding out the sensitive input attribute can be prohibitively expensive even during model training, and sometimes impossible during model serving. For example, in recommender systems, if we want to predict if a user will click on a given recommendation, we often do not know many attributes of the user, e.g., race or age, and many attributes of the content are hard to determine, e.g., the language or topic. Thus, it is not feasible to use a different classifier calibrated based on knowledge of the sensitive attribute. Here, we use an adversarial training procedure to remove information about the sensitive attribute from the latent representation learned by a neural network. In particular, we study how the choice of data for the adversarial training effects the resulting fairness properties. We find two interesting results: a small amount of data is needed to train these adversarial models, and the data distribution empirically drives the adversary's notion of fairness. We present a method for transferring neural representations from label-rich source domains to unlabeled target domains. Recent adversarial methods proposed for this task learn to align features across domains by fooling a special domain critic network. However, a drawback of this approach is that the critic simply labels the generated features as in-domain or not, without considering the boundaries between classes. This can lead to ambiguous features being generated near class boundaries, reducing target classification accuracy. We propose a novel approach, Adversarial Dropout Regularization (ADR), to encourage the generator to output more discriminative features for the target domain. Our key idea is to replace the critic with one that detects non-discriminative features, using dropout on the classifier network. The generator then learns to avoid these areas of the feature space and thus creates better features. We apply our ADR approach to the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for image classification and semantic segmentation tasks, and demonstrate significant improvement over the state of the art. We also show that our approach can be used to train Generative Adversarial Networks for semi-supervised learning. We present a method for transferring neural representations from label-rich source domains to unlabeled target domains. Recent adversarial methods proposed for this task learn to align features across domains by fooling a special domain critic network. However, a drawback of this approach is that the critic simply labels the generated features as in-domain or not, without considering the boundaries between classes. This can lead to ambiguous features being generated near class boundaries, reducing target classification accuracy. We propose a novel approach, Adversarial Dropout Regularization (ADR), to encourage the generator to output more discriminative features for the target domain. Our key idea is to replace the critic with one that detects non-discriminative features, using dropout on the classifier network. The generator then learns to avoid these areas of the feature space and thus creates better features. We apply our ADR approach to the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for image classification and semantic segmentation tasks, and demonstrate significant improvement over the state of the art. We also show that our approach can be used to train Generative Adversarial Networks for semi-supervised learning. In machine learning and computer vision, input signals are often filtered to increase data discriminability. For example, preprocessing face images with Gabor band-pass filters is known to improve performance in expression recognition tasks [1]. Sometimes, however, one may wish to purposely decrease discriminability of one classification task (a “distractor” task), while simultaneously preserving information relevant to another task (the target task): For example, due to privacy concerns, it may be important to mask the identity of persons contained in face images before submitting them to a crowdsourcing site (e.g., Mechanical Turk) when labeling them for certain facial attributes. Suppressing discriminability in distractor tasks may also be needed to improve inter-dataset generalization: training datasets may sometimes contain spurious correlations between a target attribute (e.g., facial expression) and a distractor attribute (e.g., gender). We might improve generalization to new datasets by suppressing the signal related to the distractor task in the training dataset. This can be seen as a special form of supervised regularization. In this paper we present an approach to automatically learning preprocessing filters that suppress discriminability in distractor tasks while preserving it in target tasks. We present promising results in simulated image classification problems and in a realistic expression recognition problem.