Image Representations Learned With Unsupervised Pre-Training Contain Human-like Biases
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Recent advances in machine learning leverage massive datasets of unlabeled images from the web to learn general-purpose image representations for tasks from image classification to face recognition. But do unsupervised computer vision models automatically learn implicit patterns and embed social biases that could have harmful downstream effects? For the first time, we develop a novel method for quantifying biased associations between representations of social concepts and attributes in images. We find that state-of-the-art unsupervised models trained on ImageNet, a popular benchmark image dataset curated from internet images, automatically learn racial, gender, and intersectional biases. We replicate 8 of 15 documented human biases from social psychology, from the innocuous, as with insects and flowers, to the potentially harmful, as with race and gender. For the first time in the image domain, we replicate human-like biases about skin-tone and weight. Our results also closely match three hypotheses about intersectional bias from social psychology. When compared with statistical patterns in online image datasets, our findings suggest that machine learning models can automatically learn bias from the way people are stereotypically portrayed on the web.
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