Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models
Laura Cabello, Emanuele Bugliarello, Stephanie Brandl, Desmond Elliott
Abstract
Pretrained machine learning models are known to perpetuate and even amplify existing biases in data, which can result in unfair outcomes that ultimately impact user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms behind those prejudicial biases to ensure that model performance does not result in discriminatory behaviour toward certain groups or populations. In this work, we define gender bias as our case study. We quantify bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning on three families of vision-and-language models. We investigate the connection, if any, between the two learning stages, and evaluate how bias amplification reflects on model performance. Overall, we find that bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning are independent. We then examine the effect of continued pretraining on gender-neutral data, finding that this reduces group disparities, i.e., promotes fairness, on VQAv2 and retrieval tasks without significantly compromising task performance.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.525
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8465–8483
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.525
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.525
- Cite (ACL):
- Laura Cabello, Emanuele Bugliarello, Stephanie Brandl, and Desmond Elliott. 2023. Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8465–8483, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (Cabello et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.emnlp-main.525.pdf