Has CEO Gender Bias Really Been Fixed? Adversarial Attacking and Improving Gender Fairness in Image Search release_t34b72rntvg3lodyh64cvcdiji

by Yunhe Feng, Chirag Shah

Published in PROCEEDINGS OF THE THIRTIETH AAAI CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE TWENTY-EIGHTH INNOVATIVE APPLICATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CONFERENCE by Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

2022   Volume 36, Issue 11, p11882-11890

Abstract

Gender bias is one of the most common and well-studied demographic biases in information retrieval, and in general in AI systems. After discovering and reporting that gender bias for certain professions could change searchers' worldviews, mainstreaming image search engines, such as Google, quickly took action to correct and fix such a bias. However, given the nature of these systems, viz., being opaque, it is unclear if they addressed unequal gender representation and gender stereotypes in image search results systematically and in a sustainable way. In this paper, we propose adversarial attack queries composed of professions and countries (e.g., 'CEO United States') to investigate whether gender bias is thoroughly mitigated by image search engines. Our experiments on Google, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex Image Search show that the proposed attack can trigger high levels of gender bias in image search results very effectively. To defend against such attacks and mitigate gender bias, we design and implement three novel re-ranking algorithms -- epsilon-greedy algorithm, relevance-aware swapping algorithm, and fairness-greedy algorithm, to re-rank returned images for given image queries. Experiments on both simulated (three typical gender distributions) and real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed algorithms can mitigate gender bias effectively.
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Date   2022-06-28
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