Distributionally Generative Augmentation for Fair Facial Attribute Classification

Fengda Zhang, Qianpei He, Kun Kuang, Jiashuo Liu, Long Chen, Chao Wu, Jun Xiao, Hanwang Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22797-22808

Facial Attribute Classification (FAC) holds substantial promise in widespread applications. However FAC models trained by traditional methodologies can be unfair by exhibiting accuracy inconsistencies across varied data subpopulations. This unfairness is largely attributed to bias in data where some spurious attributes (e.g. Male) statistically correlate with the target attribute (e.g. Smiling). Most of existing fairness-aware methods rely on the labels of spurious attributes which may be unavailable in practice. This work proposes a novel generation-based two-stage framework to train a fair FAC model on biased data without additional annotation. Initially we identify the potential spurious attributes based on generative models. Notably it enhances interpretability by explicitly showing the spurious attributes in image space. Following this for each image we first edit the spurious attributes with a random degree sampled from a uniform distribution while keeping target attribute unchanged. Then we train a fair FAC model by fostering model invariance to these augmentation. Extensive experiments on three common datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in promoting fairness in FAC without compromising accuracy. Codes are in https://github.com/heqianpei/DiGA.