Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints
Jieyu Zhao, Tianlu Wang, Mark Yatskar, Vicente Ordonez, Kai-Wei Chang
Abstract
Language is increasingly being used to de-fine rich visual recognition problems with supporting image collections sourced from the web. Structured prediction models are used in these tasks to take advantage of correlations between co-occurring labels and visual input but risk inadvertently encoding social biases found in web corpora. In this work, we study data and models associated with multilabel object classification and visual semantic role labeling. We find that (a) datasets for these tasks contain significant gender bias and (b) models trained on these datasets further amplify existing bias. For example, the activity cooking is over 33% more likely to involve females than males in a training set, and a trained model further amplifies the disparity to 68% at test time. We propose to inject corpus-level constraints for calibrating existing structured prediction models and design an algorithm based on Lagrangian relaxation for collective inference. Our method results in almost no performance loss for the underlying recognition task but decreases the magnitude of bias amplification by 47.5% and 40.5% for multilabel classification and visual semantic role labeling, respectively。- Anthology ID:
- D17-1323
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Editors:
- Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- SIGDAT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2979–2989
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D17-1323
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D17-1323
- Cite (ACL):
- Jieyu Zhao, Tianlu Wang, Mark Yatskar, Vicente Ordonez, and Kai-Wei Chang. 2017. Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2979–2989, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints (Zhao et al., EMNLP 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/D17-1323.pdf
- Code
- uclanlp/reducingbias + additional community code
- Data
- MS COCO