Personality and demographics are important variables in social sciences, while in NLP they can aid in interpretability and removal of societal biases. However, datasets with both personality and demographic labels are scarce. To address this, we present PANDORA, the first large-scale dataset of Reddit comments labeled with three personality models (including the well-established Big 5 model) and demographics (age, gender, and location) for more than 10k users. We showcase the usefulness of this dataset on three experiments, where we leverage the more readily available data from other personality models to predict the Big 5 traits, analyze gender classification biases arising from psycho-demographic variables, and carry out a confirmatory and exploratory analysis based on psychological theories. Finally, we present benchmark prediction models for all personality and demographic variables.
Classification of whole-brain functional connectivity MRI data with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has shown promise, but the complexity of these models impedes understanding of which aspects of brain activity contribute to classification. While visualization techniques have been developed to interpret CNNs, bias inherent in the method of encoding abstract input data, as well as the natural variance of deep learning models, detract from the accuracy of these techniques. We introduce a stochastic encoding method in an ensemble of CNNs to classify functional connectomes by gender. We applied our method to resting-state and task data from the UK BioBank, using two visualization techniques to measure the salience of three brain networks involved in task- and resting-states, and their interaction. To regress confounding factors such as head motion, age, and intracranial volume, we introduced a multivariate balancing algorithm to ensure equal distributions of such covariates between classes in our data. We achieved a final AUROC of 0.8459. We found that resting-state data classifies more accurately than task data, with the inner salience network playing the most important role of the three networks overall in classification of resting-state data and connections to the central executive network in task data.
Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) trained for face identification develop representations that generalize over variable images, while retaining subject (e.g., gender) and image (e.g., viewpoint) information. Identity, gender, and viewpoint codes were studied at the "neural unit" and ensemble levels of a face-identification network. At the unit level, identification, gender classification, and viewpoint estimation were measured by deleting units to create variably-sized, randomly-sampled subspaces at the top network layer. Identification of 3,531 identities remained high (area under the ROC approximately 1.0) as dimensionality decreased from 512 units to 16 (0.95), 4 (0.80), and 2 (0.72) units. Individual identities separated statistically on every top-layer unit. Cross-unit responses were minimally correlated, indicating that units code non-redundant identity cues. This "distributed" code requires only a sparse, random sample of units to identify faces accurately. Gender classification declined gradually and viewpoint estimation fell steeply as dimensionality decreased. Individual units were weakly predictive of gender and viewpoint, but ensembles proved effective predictors. Therefore, distributed and sparse codes co-exist in the network units to represent different face attributes. At the ensemble level, principal component analysis of face representations showed that identity, gender, and viewpoint information separated into high-dimensional subspaces, ordered by explained variance. Identity, gender, and viewpoint information contributed to all individual unit responses, undercutting a neural tuning analogy for face attributes. Interpretation of neural-like codes from DCNNs, and by analogy, high-level visual codes, cannot be inferred from single unit responses. Instead, "meaning" is encoded by directions in the high-dimensional space.
Human identification is a much attention problem in computer vision. Gender classification plays an important role in human identification as preprocess step. So far, various methods have been proposed to solve this problem. Absolutely, classification accuracy is the main challenge for researchers in gender classification. But, some challenges such as rotation, gray scale variations, pose, illumination changes may be occurred in smart phone image capturing. In this respect, a multi step approach is proposed in this paper to classify genders in human face images based on improved local binary patters (MLBP). LBP is a texture descriptor, which extract local contrast and local spatial structure information. Some issues such as noise sensitivity, rotation sensitivity and low discriminative features can be considered as disadvantages of the basic LBP. MLBP handle disadvantages using a new theory to categorize extracted binary patterns of basic LBP. The proposed approach includes two stages. First of all, a feature vector is extracted for human face images based on MLBP. Next, non linear classifiers can be used to classify gender. In this paper nearest neighborhood classifier is evaluated based on Tani-Moto metric as distance measure. In the result part, two databases, self-collected and ICPR are used as human face database. Results are compared by some state-ofthe-art algorithms in this literature that shows the high quality of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy rate. Some of other main advantages of the proposed approach are rotation invariant, low noise sensitivity, size invariant and low computational complexity. The proposed approach decreases the computational complexity of smartphone applications because of reducing the number of database comparisons. It can also improve performance of the synchronous applications in the smarphones because of memory and CPU usage reduction.
The rapid and widespread adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has called for ways to test their behaviour, and many testing approaches have successfully revealed misbehaviour of DNNs. However, it is relatively unclear what one can do to correct such behaviour after revelation, as retraining involves costly data collection and does not guarantee to fix the underlying issue. This paper introduces Arachne, a novel program repair technique for DNNs, which directly repairs DNNs using their input-output pairs as a specification. Arachne localises neural weights on which it can generate effective patches and uses Differential Evolution to optimise the localised weights and correct the misbehaviour. An empirical study using different benchmarks shows that Arachne can fix specific misclassifications of a DNN without reducing general accuracy significantly. On average, patches generated by Arachne generalise to 61.3% of unseen misbehaviour, whereas those by a state-of-the-art DNN repair technique generalise only to 10.2% and sometimes to none while taking tens of times more than Arachne. We also show that Arachne can address fairness issues by debiasing a gender classification model. Finally, we successfully apply Arachne to a text sentiment model to show that it generalises beyond Convolutional Neural Networks.
Handwriting-based gender classification is a well-researched problem that has been approached mainly by traditional machine learning techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach for this task. Specifically, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN), which performs automatic feature extraction from a given handwritten image, followed by classification of the writer's gender. Also, we introduce a new dataset of labeled handwritten samples, in Hebrew and English, of 405 participants. Comparing the gender classification accuracy on this dataset against human examiners, our results show that the proposed deep learning-based approach is substantially more accurate than that of humans.
The task of image captioning implicitly involves gender identification. However, due to the gender bias in data, gender identification by an image captioning model suffers. Also, the gender-activity bias, owing to the word-by-word prediction, influences other words in the caption prediction, resulting in the well-known problem of label bias. In this work, we investigate gender bias in the COCO captioning dataset and show that it engenders not only from the statistical distribution of genders with contexts but also from the flawed annotation by the human annotators. We look at the issues created by this bias in the trained models. We propose a technique to get rid of the bias by splitting the task into 2 subtasks: gender-neutral image captioning and gender classification. By this decoupling, the gender-context influence can be eradicated. We train the gender-neutral image captioning model, which gives comparable results to a gendered model even when evaluating against a dataset that possesses a similar bias as the training data. Interestingly, the predictions by this model on images with no humans, are also visibly different from the one trained on gendered captions. We train gender classifiers using the available bounding box and mask-based annotations for the person in the image. This allows us to get rid of the context and focus on the person to predict the gender. By substituting the genders into the gender-neutral captions, we get the final gendered predictions. Our predictions achieve similar performance to a model trained with gender, and at the same time are devoid of gender bias. Finally, our main result is that on an anti-stereotypical dataset, our model outperforms a popular image captioning model which is trained with gender.
Societal bias towards certain communities is a big problem that affects a lot of machine learning systems. This work aims at addressing the racial bias present in many modern gender recognition systems. We learn race invariant representations of human faces with an adversarially trained autoencoder model. We show that such representations help us achieve less biased performance in gender classification. We use variance in classification accuracy across different races as a surrogate for the racial bias of the model and achieve a drop of over 40% in variance with race invariant representations.
Presence of bias (in datasets or tasks) is inarguably one of the most critical challenges in machine learning applications that has alluded to pivotal debates in recent years. Such challenges range from spurious associations between variables in medical studies to the bias of race in gender or face recognition systems. Controlling for all types of biases in the dataset curation stage is cumbersome and sometimes impossible. The alternative is to use the available data and build models incorporating fair representation learning. In this paper, we propose such a model based on adversarial training with two competing objectives to learn features that have (1) maximum discriminative power with respect to the task and (2) minimal statistical mean dependence with the protected (bias) variable(s). Our approach does so by incorporating a new adversarial loss function that encourages a vanished correlation between the bias and the learned features. We apply our method to synthetic data, medical images (containing task bias), and a dataset for gender classification (containing dataset bias). Our results show that the learned features by our method not only result in superior prediction performance but also are unbiased. The code is available at https://github.com/QingyuZhao/BR-Net/.
Because of high dimensionality, correlation among covariates, and noise contained in data, dimension reduction (DR) techniques are often employed to the application of machine learning algorithms. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and their kernel variants (KPCA, KLDA) are among the most popular DR methods. Recently, Supervised Kernel Principal Component Analysis (SKPCA) has been shown as another successful alternative. In this paper, brief reviews of these popular techniques are presented first. We then conduct a comparative performance study based on three simulated datasets, after which the performance of the techniques are evaluated through application to a pattern recognition problem in face image analysis. The gender classification problem is considered on MORPH-II and FG-NET, two popular longitudinal face aging databases. Several feature extraction methods are used, including biologically-inspired features (BIF), local binary patterns (LBP), histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and the Active Appearance Model (AAM). After applications of DR methods, a linear support vector machine (SVM) is deployed with gender classification accuracy rates exceeding 95% on MORPH-II, competitive with benchmark results. A parallel computational approach is also proposed, attaining faster processing speeds and similar recognition rates on MORPH-II. Our computational approach can be applied to practical gender classification systems and generalized to other face analysis tasks, such as race classification and age prediction.
Identification using biometrics is an important yet challenging task. Abundant research has been conducted on identifying personal identity or gender using given signals. Various types of biometrics such as electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG), face, fingerprint, and voice have been used for these tasks. Most research has only focused on single modality or a single task, while the combination of input modality or tasks is yet to be investigated. In this paper, we propose deep identification and gender classification using multimodal biometrics. Our model uses ECG, fingerprint, and facial data. It then performs two tasks: gender identification and classification. By engaging multi-modality, a single model can handle various input domains without training each modality independently, and the correlation between domains can increase its generalization performance on the tasks.
In this paper, we present multimodal deep neural network frameworks for age and gender classification, which take input a profile face image as well as an ear image. Our main objective is to enhance the accuracy of soft biometric trait extraction from profile face images by additionally utilizing a promising biometric modality: ear appearance. For this purpose, we provided end-to-end multimodal deep learning frameworks. We explored different multimodal strategies by employing data, feature, and score level fusion. To increase representation and discrimination capability of the deep neural networks, we benefited from domain adaptation and employed center loss besides softmax loss. We conducted extensive experiments on the UND-F, UND-J2, and FERET datasets. Experimental results indicated that profile face images contain a rich source of information for age and gender classification. We found that the presented multimodal system achieves very high age and gender classification accuracies. Moreover, we attained superior results compared to the state-of-the-art profile face image or ear image-based age and gender classification methods.
Differential privacy (DP) is a popular mechanism for training machine learning models with bounded leakage about the presence of specific points in the training data. The cost of differential privacy is a reduction in the model's accuracy. We demonstrate that in the neural networks trained using differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), this cost is not borne equally: accuracy of DP models drops much more for the underrepresented classes and subgroups. For example, a gender classification model trained using DP-SGD exhibits much lower accuracy for black faces than for white faces. Critically, this gap is bigger in the DP model than in the non-DP model, i.e., if the original model is unfair, the unfairness becomes worse once DP is applied. We demonstrate this effect for a variety of tasks and models, including sentiment analysis of text and image classification. We then explain why DP training mechanisms such as gradient clipping and noise addition have disproportionate effect on the underrepresented and more complex subgroups, resulting in a disparate reduction of model accuracy.
It is common to view people in real applications walking in arbitrary directions, holding items, or wearing heavy coats. These factors are challenges in gait-based application methods because they significantly change a person's appearance. This paper proposes a novel method for classifying human gender in real time using gait information. The use of an average gait image (AGI), rather than a gait energy image (GEI), allows this method to be computationally efficient and robust against view changes. A viewpoint (VP) model is created for automatically determining the viewing angle during the testing phase. A distance signal (DS) model is constructed to remove any areas with an attachment (carried items, worn coats) from a silhouette to reduce the interference in the resulting classification. Finally, the human gender is classified using multiple view-dependent classifiers trained using a support vector machine. Experiment results confirm that the proposed method achieves a high accuracy of 98.8% on the CASIA Dataset B and outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of periocular-based sex-prediction (commonly referred to as gender classification) using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. In order to reflect a more challenging scenario where periocular images are likely to be obtained from an unknown source, i.e. sensor, convolutional neural networks are trained on fused sets composed of several near-infrared (NIR) and visible wavelength (VW) image databases. In a cross-sensor scenario within each spectrum an average classification accuracy of approximately 85\% is achieved. When sex-prediction is performed across spectra an average classification accuracy of about 82\% is obtained. Finally, a multi-spectral sex-prediction yields a classification accuracy of 83\% on average. Compared to proposed works, obtained results provide a more realistic estimation of the feasibility to predict a subject's sex from the periocular region.
Soft biometric information such as gender can contribute to many applications like as identification and security. This paper explores the use of a Binary Statistical Features (BSIF) algorithm for classifying gender from iris texture images captured with NIR sensors. It uses the same pipeline for iris recognition systems consisting of iris segmentation, normalisation and then classification. Experiments show that applying BSIF is not straightforward since it can create artificial textures causing misclassification. In order to overcome this limitation, a new set of filters was trained from eye images and different sized filters with padding bands were tested on a subject-disjoint database. A Modified-BSIF (MBSIF) method was implemented. The latter achieved better gender classification results (94.6\% and 91.33\% for the left and right eye respectively). These results are competitive with the state of the art in gender classification. In an additional contribution, a novel gender labelled database was created and it will be available upon request.
Most gender classifications methods from NIR images have used iris information. Recent work has explored the use of the whole periocular iris region which has surprisingly achieve better results. This suggests the most relevant information for gender classification is not located in the iris as expected. In this work, we analyze and demonstrate the location of the most relevant features that describe gender in periocular NIR images and evaluate its influence its classification. Experiments show that the periocular region contains more gender information than the iris region. We extracted several features (intensity, texture, and shape) and classified them according to its relevance using the XgBoost algorithm. Support Vector Machine and nine ensemble classifiers were used for testing gender accuracy when using the most relevant features. The best classification results were obtained when 4,000 features located on the periocular region were used (89.22\%). Additional experiments with the full periocular iris images versus the iris-Occluded images were performed. The gender classification rates obtained were 84.35\% and 85.75\% respectively. We also contribute to the state of the art with a new database (UNAB-Gender). From results, we suggest focussing only on the surrounding area of the iris. This allows us to realize a faster classification of gender from NIR periocular images.
Recent work shows unequal performance of commercial face classification services in the gender classification task across intersectional groups defined by skin type and gender. Accuracy on dark-skinned females is significantly worse than on any other group. In this paper, we conduct several analyses to try to uncover the reason for this gap. The main finding, perhaps surprisingly, is that skin type is not the driver. This conclusion is reached via stability experiments that vary an image's skin type via color-theoretic methods, namely luminance mode-shift and optimal transport. A second suspect, hair length, is also shown not to be the driver via experiments on face images cropped to exclude the hair. Finally, using contrastive post-hoc explanation techniques for neural networks, we bring forth evidence suggesting that differences in lip, eye and cheek structure across ethnicity lead to the differences. Further, lip and eye makeup are seen as strong predictors for a female face, which is a troubling propagation of a gender stereotype.
We present an empirical study of applying deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to the task of fashion and apparel image classification to improve meta-data enrichment of e-commerce applications. Five different CNN architectures were analyzed using clean and pre-trained models. The models were evaluated in three different tasks person detection, product and gender classification, on two small and large scale datasets.
Generally, facial age variations affect gender classification accuracy significantly, because facial shape and skin texture change as they grow old. This requires re-examination on the gender classification system to consider facial age information. In this paper, we propose Multi-expert Gender Classification on Age Group (MGA), an end-to-end multi-task learning schemes of age estimation and gender classification. First, two types of deep neural networks are utilized; Convolutional Appearance Network (CAN) for facial appearance feature and Deep Geometry Network (DGN) for facial geometric feature. Then, CAN and DGN are integrated by the proposed model integration strategy and fine-tuned in order to improve age and gender classification accuracy. The facial images are categorized into one of three age groups (young, adult and elder group) based on their estimated age, and the system makes a gender prediction according to average fusion strategy of three gender classification experts, which are trained to fit gender characteristics of each age group. Rigorous experimental results conducted on the challenging databases suggest that the proposed MGA outperforms several state-of-art researches with smaller computational cost.