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Fairness by Learning Orthogonal Disentangled Representations

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNIP,volume 12374)

Abstract

Learning discriminative powerful representations is a crucial step for machine learning systems. Introducing invariance against arbitrary nuisance or sensitive attributes while performing well on specific tasks is an important problem in representation learning. This is mostly approached by purging the sensitive information from learned representations. In this paper, we propose a novel disentanglement approach to invariant representation problem. We disentangle the meaningful and sensitive representations by enforcing orthogonality constraints as a proxy for independence. We explicitly enforce the meaningful representation to be agnostic to sensitive information by entropy maximization. The proposed approach is evaluated on five publicly available datasets and compared with state of the art methods for learning fairness and invariance achieving the state of the art performance on three datasets and comparable performance on the rest. Further, we perform an ablative study to evaluate the effect of each component.

Keywords

  • Representation learning
  • Disentangled representation
  • Fairness in machine learning

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/ethics-guidelines-trustworthy-ai.

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Acknowledgments

S.A. is supported by the PRIME programme of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

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Correspondence to Mhd Hasan Sarhan .

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Sarhan, M.H., Navab, N., Eslami, A., Albarqouni, S. (2020). Fairness by Learning Orthogonal Disentangled Representations. In: Vedaldi, A., Bischof, H., Brox, T., Frahm, JM. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2020. ECCV 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12374. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58526-6_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58526-6_44

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