Niharika Jain

Niharika Jain, Alberto Olmo, Sailik Sengupta et al.

In this paper, we show that popular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) exacerbate biases along the axes of gender and skin tone when given a skewed distribution of face-shots. While practitioners celebrate synthetic data generation using GANs as an economical way to augment data for training data-hungry machine learning models, it is unclear whether they recognize the perils of such techniques when applied to real world datasets biased along latent dimensions. Specifically, we show that (1) traditional GANs further skew the distribution of a dataset consisting of engineering faculty headshots, generating minority modes less often and of worse quality and (2) image-to-image translation (conditional) GANs also exacerbate biases by lightening skin color of non-white faces and transforming female facial features to be masculine when generating faces of engineering professors. Thus, our study is meant to serve as a cautionary tale.

Niharika Jain, Lydia Manikonda, Alberto Olmo Hernandez et al.

The use of synthetic data generated by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has become quite a popular method to do data augmentation for many applications. While practitioners celebrate this as an economical way to get more synthetic data that can be used to train downstream classifiers, it is not clear that they recognize the inherent pitfalls of this technique. In this paper, we aim to exhort practitioners against deriving any false sense of security against data biases based on data augmentation. To drive this point home, we show that starting with a dataset consisting of head-shots of engineering researchers, GAN-based augmentation "imagines" synthetic engineers, most of whom have masculine features and white skin color (inferred from a human subject study conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk). This demonstrates how biases inherent in the training data are reinforced, and sometimes even amplified, by GAN-based data augmentation; it should serve as a cautionary tale for the lay practitioners.