Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models

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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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Publication date2023
Pages8465-8483
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Singapore
Duration: 6 Dec 202310 Dec 2023

Conference

Conference2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
BySingapore
Periode06/12/202310/12/2023

ID: 382997067