A View From Somewhere: Human-Centric Face Representations

Biases in human-centric computer vision models are often attributed to a lack of sufficient data diversity, with many demographics insufficiently represented. However, auditing datasets for diversity can be difficult, due to an absence of ground-truth labels of relevant features. Few datasets contain self-identified demographic information, inferring demographic information risks introducing additional biases, and collecting and storing data on sensitive attributes can carry legal risks. Moreover, categorical demographic labels do not necessarily capture all the relevant dimensions of human diversity that are important for developing fair and robust models. We propose to implicitly learn a set of continuous face-varying dimensions, without ever asking an annotator to explicitly categorize a person. We uncover the dimensions by learning on a novel dataset of 638,180 human judgments of face similarity (FAX). We demonstrate the utility of our learned embedding space for predicting face similarity judgments, collecting continuous face attribute values, and comparative dataset diversity auditing. Moreover, using a novel conditional framework, we show that an annotator's demographics influences the importance they place on different attributes when judging similarity, underscoring the need for diverse annotator groups to avoid biases.