Bias Analysis for Unconditional Image Generative Models

The widespread usage of generative AI models raises concerns regarding fairness and potential discriminatory outcomes. In this work, we define the bias of an attribute (e.g., gender or race) as the difference between the probability of its presence in the observed distribution and its expected proportion in an ideal reference distribution. Despite efforts to study social biases in these models, the origin of biases in generation remains unclear. Many components in generative AI models may contribute to biases. This study focuses on the inductive bias of unconditional generative models, one of the core components, in image generation tasks. We propose a standardized bias evaluation framework to study bias shift between training and generated data distributions. We train unconditional image generative models on the training set and generate images unconditionally. To obtain attribute labels for generated images, we train a classifier using ground truth labels. We compare the bias of given attributes between generation and data distribution using classifier-predicted labels. This absolute difference is named bias shift. Our experiments reveal that biases are indeed shifted in image generative models. Different attributes exhibit varying bias shifts' sensitivity towards distribution shifts. We propose a taxonomy categorizing attributes as $\textit{subjective}$ (high sensitivity) or $\textit{non-subjective}$ (low sensitivity), based on whether the classifier's decision boundary falls within a high-density region. We demonstrate an inconsistency between conventional image generation metrics and observed bias shifts.