# Evaluating the Fairness of Discriminative Foundation Models
in Computer Vision

Junaid Ali<EMAIL_ADDRESS>MPI for Software Systems ,  Matthäus
Kleindessner<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Amazon Web Services ,  Florian Wenzel
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Amazon Web Services ,  Kailash Budhathoki<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Amazon Web Services ,  Volkan Cevher<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Amazon Web Services
and  Chris Russell<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Amazon Web Services

(2023)

###### Abstract.

We propose a novel taxonomy for bias evaluation of discriminative foundation
models, such as Contrastive Language-Pretraining (CLIP), that are used for
labeling tasks. We then systematically evaluate existing methods for
mitigating bias in these models with respect to our taxonomy. Specifically, we
evaluate OpenAI’s CLIP and OpenCLIP models for key applications, such as zero-
shot classification, image retrieval and image captioning. We categorize
desired behaviors based around three axes: (i) if the task concerns humans;
(ii) how subjective the task is (i.e., how likely it is that people from a
diverse range of backgrounds would agree on a labeling); and (iii) the
intended purpose of the task and if fairness is better served by impartiality
(i.e., making decisions independent of the protected attributes) or
representation (i.e., making decisions to maximize diversity). Finally, we
provide quantitative fairness evaluations for both binary-valued and multi-
valued protected attributes over ten diverse datasets. We find that fair PCA,
a post-processing method for fair representations, works very well for
debiasing in most of the aforementioned tasks while incurring only minor loss
of performance. However, different debiasing approaches vary in their
effectiveness depending on the task. Hence, one should choose the debiasing
approach depending on the specific use case.

††journalyear: 2023††copyright: rightsretained††conference: AAAI/ACM
Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society; August 8–10, 2023; Montréal, QC,
Canada††booktitle: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES ’23),
August 8–10, 2023, Montréal, QC, Canada††doi: 10.1145/3600211.3604720††isbn:
979-8-4007-0231-0/23/08

##  1\. Introduction

Popular generative foundation models regularly make the news, both because of
the rapid rate of progress in the field and the potential harms including
copyright violation and the hallucination of incorrect and possibly libelous
data. However, in many ways the dangers of discriminative models can be more
insidious. Discriminative111Our use of the words “generative” and
“discriminative” follows the machine learning literature (e.g., (Bishop,
2006)). A generative model is one that can generate synthetic data, such as
images or text, and a discriminative model is one that can distinguish between
types of data, for example, by classifying images as cats or dogs. This use of
“discriminative” does not imply that the model is biased towards or against
particular protected groups.  models such as CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) allow
for the zero-shot classification of data, i.e., without access to labeled
training data they can assign images to a set of previously unseen labels. As
zero-shot solutions do not require conventional data sources, models can be
optimistically deployed without systematically evaluating if they are
accurate, fair, or even if the task they are deployed on makes sense (e.g.,
identify hard workers from resume photographs). Because discriminative models
may be used to make decisions about individuals, their behavior can have a
direct impact on a person’s life (e.g., through controlling access to
education, employment or medical care) in a way that generative models that
create text or images do not.

Table 1. The range of desiderata and their corresponding measures. The
motivation underlying our desiderata is straightforward: where consistent
labelings exist, we expect foundation models to reproduce them, and in human-
centric tasks we should reproduce them equally well for all groups. Where
labels are subjective (i.e., likely to be labeled inconsistently by different
groups), reproducing labels is less of a concern, and instead we prioritize
groups to be represented equally. The question then is what does ‘equally’
mean? For much of the fairness literature, ‘equally’ refers to the idea that
decisions should be made independently of protected attributes such as race or
gender (potentially conditioned on the true label). This leads to notions such
as equal opportunity (Hardt et al., 2016) (see “independence measures” in the
top left part of the table) or demographic parity (Kamiran and Calders, 2012)
(“independence measures” in the bottom left part of the table). However, this
is not the only relevant notion of equal representation. In some cases, we may
wish to sample uniformly from the _support of the distribution_ rather than
the distribution, and this leads to analogous notions provided under
“diversity measures” in the table. By $Y,\hat{Y},Z$ we denote a datapoint’s
ground-truth label, predicted label, and protected attribute, respectively;
$P$ denotes a generic probability distribution over these three variables.

| HUMAN-CENTRIC | NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC
---|---|---
Objective task | Labels should be reproduced | Labels should be reproduced consistently
consistently for all groups
Independence measures: |
High performance per group on standard metrics and |  High performance on standard metrics Tables 2, 4, and 18
$P(\hat{Y}=1|Z=z_{1},Y=1)=P(\hat{Y}=1|Z=z_{2},Y=1)\leavevmode\nobreak\ \forall
z_{1},z_{2}$
Figures 2 and 6
Diversity measures:
High performance per group on standard metrics and
$P(\hat{Y}=1\wedge Z=z_{1}\wedge Y=1)=P(\hat{Y}=1\wedge Z=z_{2}\wedge Y=1)\leavevmode\nobreak\ \forall z_{1},z_{2}$ |
Table 3 |
Subjective task | Labels should represent all groups equally | _Out of scope_
Independence measures:
$P(\hat{Y}=1|Z=z_{1})=P(\hat{Y}=1|Z=z_{2})\leavevmode\nobreak\ \forall
z_{1},z_{2}$
Figures 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 14, 15 and 16.
Tables 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 17.
Diversity measures:
$P(\hat{Y}=1\wedge Z=z_{1})=P(\hat{Y}=1\wedge Z=z_{2})\leavevmode\nobreak\
\forall z_{1},z_{2}$
| Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 16 |

This work looks at the potential harms associated with classifying, retrieving
and captioning image data using discriminative multi-modal foundation models,
and ask a key question:

What constitutes the desired behavior for discriminative foundation models in
downstream tasks?

Our goal is challenging due to a combination of two factors: first, the rise
and commoditization of zero-shot machine learning; and second, the plethora of
inconsistent fairness definitions (Verma and Rubin, 2018).

Intrinsically, zero-shot hinges on the idea that a single ML system should
perform well on diverse unseen datasets without specialist training
(Larochelle et al., 2008), while algorithmic fairness has consolidated on the
idea that specific fairness definitions are more appropriate for specific
tasks (Verma and Rubin, 2018). The intersection of these ideas creates a
tension.

Indeed, how can we check the fairness of a general-purpose system if we cannot
agree on a general definition of fairness? To address this question, we
propose a coarse taxonomy of tasks and describe the ideal behavior of a
foundation model on such tasks. We base our taxonomy around three concepts:

  1. (1)

_Human centricity:_ Do the labels concern humans?

  2. (2)

_Label consistency:_ Is there likely to be an agreement on how data should be
labeled both within a culture and across a wide range of cultures?

  3. (3)

_Purpose of the task:_ Can the task be perceived to be assigning labels to
individuals, or to be recovering diverse samples that characterize the spread
of data?

Based on the answers to these questions, we propose metrics that encode the
values implicit in these decisions (see Table 1).

Importantly, we find that different answers to these questions naturally lead
to different metrics. Consequently, we observe that many of the existing works
in fairness for foundation models, which propose new methods evaluated with
respect to particular metrics, are enforcing unexamined value judgments about
what the ideal behavior should be. Moreover, as part of the taxonomy depends
not only on the type of task but also on the purpose, it is impossible to
satisfy all metrics simultaneously.

Using our taxonomy, we provide a systematic evaluation of OpenAI’s CLIP
(Radford et al., 2021) and OpenCLIP (Ilharco et al., 2021) models, for binary
(gender) and multi-valued (race) attributes.222 As an artifact of the
available datasets, we make use of annotations that indicate _perceived_
gender and race. Labels are assigned coarsely by a third party into binary
bins for gender and into seven racial groups (see (Karkkainen and Joo, 2021)
for details). They do not reflect how people in the dataset identify.
Additionally, we evaluate a range of existing bias mitigation methods for
these models. We argue that existing fairness methods are designed to
encourage either independence or diversity, and show empirically that they
prioritize one or the other. As such, the choice of a particular fairness
method should be driven by the intended use case, and a decision as to which
harms are relevant (Section 4).

##### Outline of the paper

In Section 2, we first review the CLIP model and some of its fairness issues
highlighted in the existing literature and describe the different debiasing
methods we evaluate. In Section 3, we explain the details of different
evaluation tasks. In Section 4, we introduce different fairness metrics for
which we show the results in Section 5. In Section 6 we conclude the paper.

##  2\. Foundation Models, CLIP, and Fairness of CLIP

In the past few years, _large_ models trained on huge amounts of data,
primarily crawled from the internet, have become popular (e.g., BERT (Devlin
et al., 2018), CLIP (Radford et al., 2021), GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020), DALL-E
(Ramesh et al., 2021), Stable Diffusion (Rombach et al., 2022)). Many of these
models have gained attention even in the general public and extensive news
coverage, which typically also addresses the risks and shortcomings of these
models (e.g., (Perrigo, 2021; Metz, 2022)). These large models are now
commonly referred to as foundation models, a name coined by researchers from
Stanford to “underscore their critically central yet incomplete character”
(Bommasani et al., 2022). They exist in various flavors that cover a wide
range of data modalities (e.g., language, vision or multi-modal), training
objectives (e.g., predicting a word deleted from a piece of text or aligning
images and their captions in a joint embedding space) and application areas
(e.g., data generation tasks such as image synthesis or data analysis tasks
such as image classification, retrieval or captioning). What foundation models
have in common is that they were trained on broad data, where the quantity of
data was prioritized over its quality, and that they can be adapted to a wide
range of downstream tasks, often with no or only minimal supervision. The
former property makes foundation models prone to concerning behavior, ranging
from algorithmic bias (Radford et al., 2021) over toxicity and offensive
content (Chiu et al., 2022) to privacy concerns (Carlini et al., 2020). The
latter property increases the risk that any concerning behavior could spread
much wider than with a traditional model trained to solve a specific task.

In this section, we briefly describe the required background of the CLIP model
as an illustration of a typical discriminative foundation model and relevant
fairness concerns. We discuss additional related work in Appendix A.

###  2.1. Contrastive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP)

OpenAI’s CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) is a discriminative foundation model for
computer vision trained on 400 million image-text pairs to align corresponding
image and text examples within a joint embedding space. To that end, CLIP uses
a contrastive loss which tries to push the representations of the
corresponding image and text examples together and the representations of the
non-corresponding examples far apart. This joint multi-modal embedding space
can then be used for several downstream tasks such as image retrieval, image
captioning or zero-shot classification. CLIP achieves remarkable zero-shot
classification performance in several tasks, which in some cases rivals that
of the classical supervised competitors. In certain scenarios, the downstream
applications could result in direct harm to individuals, e.g., classifying
images into professionals vs non-professionals, retrieving a set of doctors
from a dataset or captioning images for assisting blind people, which give
rise to several fairness concerns. While OpenAI’s CLIP is proprietary, we also
present results (Section 5.5 and Appendix F) for its open source
implementation OpenCLIP (Ilharco et al., 2021). OpenCLIP has the same
objective function and architecture as the original OpenAI CLIP, but it was
trained on the publicly available LAION-400M dataset (Schuhmann et al., 2021).

###  2.2. Existing fairness evaluations of CLIP

Recent works highlighted some biases present in the CLIP model. The original
CLIP paper (Radford et al., 2021) demonstrated gender and race biases in
certain zero-shot tasks including classifying facial images into crime-related
vs. non-crime-related categories or into human vs. non-human animal
categories. These fairness evaluations were limited in scope to a small number
of tasks and datasets.

Wang et al. (2021a), Berg et al. (2022) and Dehouche (Dehouche, 2021)
demonstrated that CLIP embeddings have a gender or race bias in certain tasks.
In their study, Wang et al. (2021a) highlighted gender bias in CLIP embeddings
when used for image retrieval tasks. In their experiments, they first created
gender-neutral test queries by replacing the gendered words with neutral
alternatives in the captions of the MSCOCO 1K test set. Subsequently, they
utilized the CLIP embeddings to retrieve images based on these neutral
queries. Their findings reveal that, on average, 6.4 out of top 10 results
were images of men. However, it is important to consider a few factors while
considering their results. i) They did not provide additional metrics that
account for differences in the base rate of men and women. ii) They did not
evaluate the fairness of CLIP embeddings using well-known fairness measures,
such as demographic parity or equality of opportunity. iii) Their approach
involved aggregating the signed biases of all queries. This aggregation method
can potentially lead to the cancellation of systematic biases across different
queries, thereby reducing the apparent bias of the system. For instance, if a
search for ‘home-maker’ predominantly returns women and a search for
‘technician’ predominantly returns men, aggregating the two together suggests
greater gender neutrality than when considering any one on its own.

Berg et al. (Berg et al., 2022) have also raised concerns in gender-related
fairness issues of the CLIP embeddings. Their findings indicate that the CLIP
model exhibits a representation bias with respect to gender in image retrieval
tasks, particularly for queries such as clever, lazy, hardworking, kind, or
unkind. However, it is worth noting that their analysis is limited to the
face-focused FairFace and UTKFace datasets. Additionally, their evaluation of
zero-shot classification was limited to the classification categories
presented in the original CLIP paper (Radford et al., 2021). Another aspect
that their analysis is missing is the evaluation on well-established fairness
metrics such as demographic parity and equal opportunity. Instead, they
primarily focus on ranking metrics like Skew (Geyik et al., 2019) and KL-
divergence.

Figure 1. [Classification - DDP - Subjective - FairFace] We plot DDP, given in
Eq. (1) for gender (left) and race (right), summarizing the distribution over
multiple zero-shot classification tasks (provided in Appendix C) using
FairFace dataset. “GT” and “INF” refers to whether the value of the protected
attributes used to train the corresponding method were ground truth or
inferred using CLIP. These figures shows that fair PCA based methods are more
effective in reducing demographic disparity for different groups of the
protected attributes. Additionally, mutual information based methods are more
effective when more dimensions are reduced.

Dehouche (Dehouche, 2021) studied the fairness of CLIP by performing zero-shot
classification to classify 10000 synthetically generated portrait photos into
male vs. female, white person vs. person of color, attractive vs.
unattractive, friendly vs. unfriendly, rich vs. poor, and intelligent vs.
unintelligent. They found a strong correlation between classification as
female and attractive, between male and rich, and between white person and
attractive. They applied the strategy of Bolukbasi et al. (2016) for debiasing
word embeddings, by removing gender bias, and found that this strategy reduced
the correlation between classification as female and attractive or between
male and rich. Compared to Dehouche (2021), we perform a more extensive
fairness evaluation, considering not only zero-shot classification but also
image retrieval and image captioning, and we compare several bias mitigation
methods.

###  2.3. Bias mitigation methods for CLIP

In this section, we discuss two existing bias mitigation methods explicitly
proposed for CLIP and the modifications we make to run them. To our knowledge,
this is an exhaustive list — it contains every method claiming to improve the
fairness of CLIP at the time of the submission of our paper. We also discuss a
recently introduced version of fair PCA (Kleindessner et al., 2023), which is
a general approach to make representations fair and which we investigate in
our experiments. In Appendix A we discuss concurrent works for debiasing CLIP.

####  2.3.1. CLIP-clip (referred to as MI in the results)

Wang et al. (2021a) proposed a simple post-processing approach to make CLIP
representation fair w.r.t. gender. Given a dataset with gender annotations,
they calculate the mutual information between CLIP embedding on the training
split of the dataset and its corresponding values of the gender attribute.
Then, they greedily select a prescribed number of dimensions with the highest
mutual information to cut, and retain the rest of the $m$ dimension in the
CLIP representations. The smaller the value of $m$, the more debiased the CLIP
representations, as shown in Figures 1, 2, 4 and 5. However, the performance
using the reduced CLIP embeddings worsens on several non-gender related tasks,
as shown in Tables 2, 3, 4, 13 and 18. This demonstrates the well-known
accuracy-fairness trade-off.

Wang et al. (2021a) did not show results using non-binary (e.g. race)
attributes. We extend their method to the multi-valued attributes and show
results using the race attribute (see Figures 1 and 4).

####  2.3.2. Prompt learning (referred to as Prompt in the results)

Berg et al. (2022) proposed a method to reduce bias the CLIP model by
incorporating learnable text prompts into sensitive queries. To achieve this,
they select a set of queries such as ‘a photo of a good/evil/smart person’ and
utilize a dataset of images annotated with the protected group information.
For each query, they add learnable text prompts. Subsequently, they calculate
the text and image embeddings using the CLIP’s text and image encoders. Next,
they compute the similarity logits by taking the dot product between each pair
of image-text embeddings. These similarity logits are then fed into an
adversarial classifier, which aims to predict the protected attribute. The
training objective aims to learn the text prompts in a manner that prevents
the adversarial network from accurately predicting the protected attribute.
The ultimate goal is to reduce the correlation between the similarity logits
and the protected attributes. Additionally, they use an image-text contrastive
(itc) loss to maintain the performance of the embeddings. They maintain the
balance between the two loss values using a hyperparameter $\lambda$.

Berg et al. (2022) utilized FairFace dataset for the debiasing loss and
Flickr30K dataset for the itc loss, focusing on the gender attribute.
Consequently, we evaluate their method only for the gender attributes using
these datasets and the trained model shared by the authors. Just to note, they
do not provide the value of the $\lambda$ used to train the provided model.

####  2.3.3. Fair PCA (referred to as FPCA in the results)

This is a general bias mitigation method that tries to find a linear
approximation of the data that removes sensitive information (such as gender
or race) while retaining as much non-sensitive information as possible.
Specifically, the goal of fair PCA is to find a projection of datapoints
$x_{i}$ such that any function $h$ applied to a projected datapoint is
statistically independent of the protected attribute $z_{i}$. However, such a
projection may not exist, so Kleindessner et al. (2023) proposed to solve a
relaxed version of the problem. They restrict $h$ to only linear functions. In
addition, they relax the statistical independence requirement between
$h(x_{i})$ and $z_{i}$ and only require $h(x_{i})$ and $z_{i}$ to be
uncorrelated. We use this as a post-processing method for making the
representation space of OpenAI’s CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) and OpenCLIP
(Ilharco et al., 2021) models fair. We show results for this method w.r.t. to
gender and race attributes in Section 5.

####  2.3.4. Baselines

To remove the gender bias in image retrieval tasks we also show results where
we search for gendered versions of given queries and return balanced results
from the gendered queries. For example, if we wanted to retrieve 10 images for
the query “a photo of a doctor” we search for “a photo of a female doctor” and
“a photo of a male doctor” and return 5 images for each of these. This is an
instance of affirmative action (Gajane and Pechenizkiy, 2017). We refer to
this method as Gender-BLN in the results. Similarly, to address the racial
bias in image retrieval we make race-specific queries for images and return
the balanced results. We call this Race-BLN.

For the image captioning method, we propose a baseline in which we train the
captioning system on MSCOCO by removing gendered words from the captions,
e.g., “a man standing on the road” to “a person standing on the road”. We
explain the results in Section 5.4.

##  3\. Expected Behaviour and Evaluation Criteria

In this section, we discuss the tasks for which we evaluate different methods
introduced in Section 2.

Figure 2. [Classification - DTPR - Objective - CelebA] The plots show the TPR
disparity, given by Eq. (3), between men and women for three zero-shot
classification tasks using the CelebA dataset on top and the accuracy on the
bottom. The results demonstrate that mutual information and fair PCA based
methods reduce disparity. However where the dimension of the CLIP embeddings
is reduced significantly, using mutual information based methods, accuracy can
also lower significantly.

###  3.1. Binary zero-shot classification

To evaluate fairness for binary zero-shot classification, we first define a
pair of classes, e.g., nurse and doctor. Then, we encode all the images, using
CLIP’s image encoder or an image encoder provided by the corresponding method.
Similarly, we tokenize and encode the names of different classes using CLIP’s
text encoder or a text encoder provided by the corresponding method with a
fixed text prompt, e.g., “a photo of a nurse” and “a photo of a doctor”.
Depending on the methods we do further processing, e.g., for CLIP-clip we clip
the prescribed embedding and for fair PCA we transform the text and image
embeddings using a transformation matrix learned from the training split of a
given dataset. We then take the dot product and the softmax over the two
classes. Then, from the two classes, we pick the one which yields the maximum
value.

We define a set of binary classification tasks for which we believe different
genders and races should have no disparity. We provide the list of these
classes in Appendix C. As described in the introduction, Table 1, we focus on
_human-centric subjective tasks_ , e.g., ‘criminal’ vs ‘innocent person’, for
which demographic parity is desirable across different values of the protected
attributes. Similarly in datasets where we do not have access to the ground-
truth professions we expect that classification tasks such as ‘doctor’ vs
‘nurse’ or ‘CEO’ vs ‘Secretary’ should have demographic parity across
protected groups. The results for these tasks are shown in Figures 1, 3, 11,
13 and 16.

We also show results for _human-centric objective tasks_ , where we evaluate
different methods for the independence of the gender attribute w.r.t. the true
positive rates in predicting CelebA dataset’s objective categories, such as
wearing glasses, and wearing a necklace in Figure 2 and MIAP dataset’s
categories, based on age, prominence in the image, i.e., whether the bounding
box of the person occupied more than 50% of the image, and the number of
people in Figure 6.

###  3.2. Image retrieval

Similar to zero-shot classification, for the image retrieval task we select a
set of queries for which we believe there should not be any difference in the
retrieved image across different gender groups or races, we show these queries
for each dataset in Appendix C. We similarly convert the images and the
queries into their representations and calculate their cosine similarity.
Then, we select the top $k$ results from the list of the decreasing order of
the cosine similarity for each query.

Similar to zero-shot classification, we show results for _human-centric
subjective tasks_ under independence assumption in Figures 4, 5, 12, 14, and
15.

Figure 3. [Classification - DDP - Subjective - Flickr30k ] Using Flickr30K
dataset, this figure shows box plots of DDP, given by Eq. (1), for several
subjective zero-shot classification tasks. Most methods effectively reduce
classification bias, except for the prompt based method. One reason could be
that the model provided by the authors was trained to have a higher importance
for maintaining representational powers of the embedding (itc loss: Section
2.3.2) as opposed to reducing bias.

For image retrieval, fairness of representation or diversity assumption is
desirable for certain scenarios, i.e., showing images of different protected
groups in the top $k$ results. We show results for representational fairness
for _human-centric subjective tasks_ in Tables 5, 6, 7, 8, 14 and 16. For
_human-centric objective tasks,_ we show results in Table 3 under the
diversity assumption.

We report the differences in cosine similarity for each query across different
genders and races, shown in Figures 7, 8, 9, 10 and 14. We also perform
statistical tests, specifically Alexandar-govern (ANOVA)
333https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.stats.alexandergovern.html
test which allows for different variances across the groups, to demonstrate
how successful different methods are in equalizing representations for
different protected group values. The results for these are shown in Tables 9,
10, 11, 12, 15 and 17.

Figure 4. [Retrieval - DDP - Subjective - FairFace ] These figures show the
average DDP, given by Eq. (2), for gender (left) and race (right) attributes
averaged over several image retrieval tasks, given in Appendix C, using the
FairFace dataset. The results demonstrate that protected attribute specific
queries and fair PCA based methods do well in removing bias for image
retrieval tasks. Mutual information based methods also perform well for the
gender attribute.

###  3.3. Image captioning

To test fairness concerns of using CLIP models for captioning we study CLIP-
CAP (Mokady et al., 2021) which uses CLIP and GPT2 embeddings. Mokady et al.
(2021) proposed two methods: one where they froze the CLIP embedding space as
well as GPT2 embedding space and just learnt a transformer based mapping
network and second where they only froze the CLIP embedding space and learnt a
few layers of GPT2 network in addition to learning a simpler MLP network. In
our experiments, we found that the first variant does not generalize very well
to out of distribution images, which makes sense since training additional
layers of the GPT2 model results in a more expressive model. So, we use the
second variant. The authors shared the training code and hyperparameters for
MSCOCO dataset (Lin et al., 2014) and Conceptual Captions dataset. We show
results using MSCOCO dataset as the training times are faster. For
demonstrating fairness concerns in CLIP embeddings, the experiments using
MSCOCO show interesting insights as discussed in Section 5.4.

We train the CLIP-CAP model with original CLIP as well as by transforming CLIP
embeddings using different debiasing methods. We also experiment with making
the captions of MSCOCO gender neutral, e.g., by changing ‘He/She’ into ‘They’.
We then train the GPT2 layers and the MLP network. To generate captions we
encode images with the CLIP image encoders, as well as any additional
processing necessary for a particular debiasing method, and pass it through
the learned MLP and GPT2 which generates captions.

###  3.4. Performance measures

It is important that performance for different downstream tasks does not
suffer while reducing bias. To demonstrate the well-known accuracy-fairness
trade-off, we report the accuracy of a logistic regression classifier to
predict different attributes using CLIP embeddings as input, shown in Table
13. We also report the recall@$k$ performance for different values of $k$,
shown in Table 4, as well as precision shown in Tables 3 and 18. We report
accuracy for zero-shot classification tasks in Table 2.

##  4\. A taxonomy of fairness for foundation models

Here, we outline the Task-specific Desiderata and discuss relevant metrics.
Inherently, this is a coarse division and excludes many potential harms. One
of the challenges of open-labeling tasks is that many subtle harms are
possible.

While fairness typically concerns itself with the harm to an individual that a
decision is being made about444For example, the harm induced by failing to
offer someone a loan, schedule follow-up medical treatment, or in hiring
someone., other harms are possible. For example, if someone intends to use
images of scientists for recruiting materials, it is often desirable to show
diverse images capturing scientists of a range of races and genders, i.e.
capturing the support of the distribution. Repeatedly failing to capture the
entire support can discourage some people viewing the images, from considering
becoming scientists as they feel that scientists are not people like them,
referred to as the role model effect (Campbell and Wolbrecht, 2006).

##### Objective Vs. Subjective:

We describe labeling tasks to be objective if there is likely to be a high
agreement between different groups regarding the outcome. This is difficult to
quantify, as it does not imply within group disagreement, and for example
groups of labeler may consistently label data in a way that other people would
disagree with. For example, Microsoft discontinued their services in the Azure
system that infers emotional state, stating that “Experts inside and outside
the company have highlighted the lack of scientific consensus on the
definition of “emotions””555https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-
issues/2022/06/21/microsofts-framework-for-building-ai-systems-responsibly/.

##### Human-centric vs Non-Human-centric:

We consider harms associated with non-human-centric labelings to be out of
scope, although they certainly can exist. For example, labelings of sacred
places (churches, mosques and temples) should be respectful.

##### Independence vs Diversity:

How is the labeling likely to be used? Typical fairness concerns relate to
decisions made about individuals, where the independence of outcome w.r.t.
protected attribute is desirable. On the other hand, lack of diversity is also
a concern in certain applications. We consider both of these in our
evaluations.

While we put forward three binary axes as relevant: human-centric;
objective/subjective; and independent/diverse, there are only four categories
that we evaluate, as we only explore the distinction between
independence/diversity of different protected attributes’ groups for
subjective/objective human-centric labelings.

###  4.1. Human-centric (Un)fairness metrics

We describe image classification, retrieval and captioning tasks where the
labels are highly-related to people in the image as human-centric labelings.
This section presents the unfairness metrics used.

####  4.1.1. Independence assumptions:

We focus on two independence-based notions of fairness — demographic parity
(DP) (Dwork et al., 2012; Feldman et al., 2015) and equal opportunity (EOP)
(Hardt et al., 2016; Zafar et al., 2017) for subjective and objective tasks.

##### Subjective labeling tasks:

In classification, DP requires that the prediction of a datapoint be
independent of the value of the protected attribute. Specifically, given a
binary classification task where $\hat{Y}\in\\{-1,1\\}$ is the predicted
variable and $Z\in\mathbb{Z}^{+}$ represents protected membership, DP is given
as $P(\hat{Y}=1|Z=z)=P(\hat{Y})$.

##### Zero-shot binary classification:

For zero-shot classification, notions of independence are desirable. In this
section, we present metrics corresponding to DP. We define demographic
disparity (DDP) as the maximum absolute difference in the fraction datapoints
classified in the positive class among any pair of groups of the protected
group. Let $Z_{i}$ be the set of datapoints with protected attribute $i$. We
define the DDP as666We use the notation $[p]:=\\{1,\ldots,p\\}$.

(1) $\displaystyle\textbf{DDP:}\leavevmode\nobreak\ \leavevmode\nobreak\
\leavevmode\nobreak\ \max_{i,j\in[p]}\left|\frac{1}{|Z_{i}|}\sum_{x\in
Z_{i}}\mathds{1}[f(x)=1]-\frac{1}{|Z_{j}|}\sum_{x\in
Z_{j}}\mathds{1}[f(x)=1]\right|,$

where $f(x)$ is a binary classifier. DDP ranges between 0 and 1, i.e., from
least to most disparity. We use gender as a binary attribute, due to the
limited availability of datasets with multi-valued gender attributes. In this
case, the above equation reduces to the absolute difference between the
fraction of men classified in the positive class and the fraction of women
classified in the positive class. Race consists of multiple groups, and we
report the maximum absolute disparity of classification between any two
groups.

##### Image retrieval:

Depending on the downstream application, either notions of independence or
diversity of different values of the protected attribute may be desirable.

For independence, we present metrics corresponding to DP. Let $K$ be the set
of the retrieved images, comprising subset $K_{i}$ of images of the protected
group $i$, $Z_{i}$ is the set of images belonging to the group $i$ and $Z$ is
the set of all images. Following, Wachter et al. (2021) we define the DDP in
this context as follows:

(2) $\displaystyle\begin{split}\textbf{DDP:}\leavevmode\nobreak\
\leavevmode\nobreak\ \leavevmode\nobreak\
&\max_{i,j\in[p]}\bigg{|}\bigg{(}\underbrace{\frac{|K_{i}|}{|K|}}_{\text{Advantaged
group $i$}}-\underbrace{\frac{|Z_{i}|-|K_{i}|}{|Z|-|K|}}_{\text{Disadvantaged
group $i$}}\bigg{)}-\\\
&\phantom{xxxxxxx}\bigg{(}\underbrace{\frac{|K_{j}|}{|K|}}_{\text{Advantaged
group $j$}}-\underbrace{\frac{|Z_{j}|-|K_{j}|}{|Z|-|K|}}_{\text{Disadvantaged
group $j$}}\bigg{)}\bigg{|}.\end{split}$

Wachter et al. (2021) showed that this measure only takes the value $0$ when
Eq. (1) does, given that $|K_{i}|>0\,\forall i$. However, this variant is more
suitable for asymmetric labelings where a small proportion of individuals
receive positive decisions. This measure returns values ranging from $0$ to
$1$.

##### Objective labeling task – Zero-shot binary classification:

EOP requires that the prediction of all datapoints with positive labels should
be independent of the protected attribute. Specifically, a binary
classification task where $\hat{Y}\in\\{-1,1\\}$ is the predicted variable,
$Y\in\\{-1,1\\}$ is the ground truth variable and $Z\in\mathbb{Z}^{+}$
represents the protected attribute EOP requires
$P(\hat{Y}=1|Y=1,Z=z)=P(\hat{Y})$.

Similar to DDP, given in Eq. (1), we can extend the definition for EOP to
disparity in true positive rates (DTPR):

(3) $\displaystyle\begin{split}\textbf{DTPR:}\leavevmode\nobreak\
\leavevmode\nobreak\ \leavevmode\nobreak\
&\max_{i,j\in[p]}\bigg{|}\frac{1}{|{Z_{i}}^{+}|}\sum_{x\in{Z_{i}}^{+}}\mathds{1}[f(x)=1]-\\\
&\phantom{xxxxxxxxx}\frac{1}{|{Z_{j}}^{+}|}\sum_{x\in{Z_{j}}^{+}}\mathds{1}[f(x)=1]\bigg{|},\end{split}$

where ${Z_{*}}^{+}$ is the set of datapoints with protected attribute $*$.

For image retrieval tasks, we could easily extend Eq. (2) for EOP, e.g., by
confining all the sets to positive examples.

####  4.1.2. Diversity assumptions – Image retrieval:

We use the following metrics to measure unfairness in the representation.

##### Subjective labeling tasks:

We use the Skew metric of Geyik et al. (2019). Let $K$ be the set of $|K|$
items we want to retrieve comprising of sets $K_{i}$ that belong to the
protected attribute group $i$. Let ${df}_{i}$ be the desired fraction of items
belonging to the group $i$ in the top $|K|$ results, and
${rf}_{i}:=\frac{|K_{i}|}{|K|}$ be the retrieved fraction of items.

(4) Skew@k:
$\displaystyle\max_{i,j\in[p]}\bigg{|}\log_{e}({rf}_{i}/{df}_{i})\bigg{|}$

We set $df_{i}=\frac{1}{p}$, where $p$ is the number of protected groups.

##### Objective labeling tasks:

Let $K^{+}$ be the set of ground truth positive images retrieved for a given
query, out of which ${K_{i}}^{+}$ are the retrieved images that belong to the
protected attributes group $i$. We report the maximum absolute disparity in
the representation (DDP-Rep) of any two protected attribute groups, i.e.,

(5) DDP-rep:
$\displaystyle\max_{i,j\in[p]}\frac{1}{|K^{+}|}\bigg{|}|{K_{i}}^{+}|-|{K_{j}}^{+}|\bigg{|}.$

This metric shows how well different groups are represented in a retrieval
task even if the ground truth is imbalanced.

###  4.2. Non-human-centric labelings: performance metrics

By non-human-centric labelings, we refer to image classification, image
retrieval and image captioning tasks where the labels are unrelated to people
in the image. While we do not consider the harms associated with this task,
performance remains important.

For _objective non-human-centric_ tasks, e.g., categorizing images as showing
either ‘cats’ or ‘dogs’, or searching for ‘a photograph of an oak tree’,
performance is important, and the correct notion of performance is task
dependent. Following Radford et al. (2021) we use accuracy to measure the
performance of zero-shot classifiers, recall@k and precision@k. Ideally, there
should be no decrease in performance for these tasks, as we do not have
fairness concerns.

For _subjective non-human-centric_ tasks we might also have fairness concerns,
e.g., that a search for “beautiful building” might be biased towards Christian
churches and omit buildings associated with other religions. However, these
concerns are harder to evaluate especially due to lack of data and ground
truth labels.

Figure 5. [Retrieval - DDP - Subjective - Flickr30k ] The plot shows the DDP,
given by Eq. (2), for gender attribute using Flickr30K dataset. All the
methods, except the prompt based method, decrease the disparity between men
and women for the retrieval tasks.

##  5\. Evaluation: Results

In this section, we demonstrate the results according to our proposed taxonomy
introduced in Table 1. Given that IND refers to the independence of the
protected attribute w.r.t. to the outcome variable (metrics: Eqs. (1), (2) and
(3)) and DIV refers to the diversity of the protected attribute groups in the
retrieval results (metrics: Eqs. (4) and (5)), we answer the following
questions in this section.

Q1: How fair (IND) are different methods w.r.t. gender for zero-shot binary
classification on subjective and objective tasks? Q2: How fair (IND) are
different methods w.r.t. race for zero-shot binary classification on
subjective tasks? Q3: How fair (IND or DIV) are different methods w.r.t.
gender for image retrieval tasks on subjective and objective tasks? Q4: How
fair (IND or DIV) are different methods w.r.t. race for image retrieval
subjective tasks? Q5: How is the performance on the attributes on which
fairness was not enforced affected? Q6: Are there statistically significant
differences in representations for different methods w.r.t. gender? Q7: Are
there statistically significant differences in representations for different
methods w.r.t. race? Q8: What are the fairness (IND) concerns using CLIP
embeddings for captioning systems? Q9: Do CLIP bias mitigation methods help
alleviate fairness concerns in captioning?

Table 2.  [Classification - Accuracy - Objective - StanfordCars, Food-101, VOC
objects & Imagenet] The bias mitigation methods shown in the table were
trained using the FairFace Dataset. We used the test splits for all the
datasets. The results show that fair PCA based methods retain performance on
non-human objective tasks. We would like to note that we only show results
with a prompt of “a photo of a {label}”, while the original CLIP paper
aggregates results using several prompts, which they did not disclose. In some
cases this can result in a difference in evaluation numbers that we are
reporting compared to the original CLIP paper. However, our results are within
the margin of improvement that the original CLIP paper claims to achieve using
prompt engineering.

Mitigated | Dataset | Backbone | CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Prompt-GT | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Gender | Food-101 | ViTB/32 | 82.3 | 79.2 | 67.6 | 79.3 | 67.0 | – | 82.3 | 82.3
Race | Food-101 | ViTB/32 | 82.3 | 77.7 | 66.3 | 77.7 | 68.6 | – | 81.5 | 81.5
Gender | Food-101 | ViTB/16 | 87.0 | 85.1 | 76.6 | 85.0 | 76.0 | 87.3 | 87.1 | 87.0
Race | Food-101 | ViTB/16 | 87.0 | 85.1 | 76.5 | 85.0 | 77.6 | – | 86.3 | 86.4
Gender | StanfordCars | ViTB/32 | 60.2 | 53.6 | 44.9 | 53.5 | 46.1 | – | 60.1 | 60.2
Race | StanfordCars | ViTB/32 | 60.2 | 54.4 | 43.0 | 55.2 | 43.8 | – | 60.0 | 59.5
Gender | StanfordCars | ViTB/16 | 65.6 | 59.7 | 50.2 | 61.3 | 51.8 | 64.7 | 65.3 | 65.3
Race | StanfordCars | ViTB/16 | 65.6 | 59.8 | 49.0 | 61.7 | 48.8 | – | 65.3 | 65.4
Gender | VOC | ViTB/32 | 83.8 | 83.0 | 77.0 | 82.3 | 74.9 | – | 83.7 | 83.7
Race | VOC | ViTB/32 | 83.8 | 82.7 | 65.8 | 83.3 | 63.9 | – | 84.5 | 84.6
Gender | VOC | ViTB/16 | 85.7 | 76.6 | 67.9 | 76.3 | 71.7 | 82.9 | 85.6 | 85.7
Race | VOC | ViTB/16 | 85.7 | 87.9 | 76.5 | 89.0 | 75.8 | – | 85.7 | 85.3
Gender | Imagenet | ViTB/32 | 59.2 | 54.4 | 37.1 | 54.3 | 37.5 | – | 59.2 | 59.2
Race | Imagenet | ViTB/32 | 59.2 | 53.5 | 34.6 | 53.7 | 34.8 | – | 58.9 | 58.9
Gender | Imagenet | ViTB/16 | 63.8 | 55.4 | 40.3 | 55.5 | 41.2 | 63.2 | 63.8 | 63.8
Race | Imagenet | ViTB/16 | 63.8 | 58.3 | 43.4 | 58.2 | 43.4 | – | 63.5 | 63.6

###  5.1. Experimental details

We show results for the methods of Section 2.3. For different fairness metrics
we show results using OpenAI’s CLIP ViTB-16 architecture. We find similar
trends in results using ViTB-32 architecture. For performance results on
objective tasks, we show results using both ViTB-16 and ViTB-32 architectures.
Due to space limitations, the results using OpenCLIP model can be found in
Appendix F.

For mutual-information (MI) based method described in Section 2.3.1 we show
results where we retain $m\in\\{400,256\\}$ dimensions of the total 512 CLIP
embedding dimensions. FPCA refers to fair PCA as described in Section 2.3.3.
Prompt is the method described in Section 2.3.2. Gender-BLN refers to the
baseline for the image retrieval task, where we add the words ‘female’ and
‘male’ to the query and return $\frac{K}{2}$ results from each of these
queries. Race-BLN works similarly for the multi-valued race attribute.

##### Addressing lack of demographic features:

For our fairness evaluations we use datasets where we have access to the
demographic features. However, in real-world scenarios we might not have
access to such features. To demonstrate results for such cases, we use the
CLIP model to predict the gender attribute. The tags GT and INF indicate
whether the protected attribute was ground truth or inferred. It is important
to note that we only use the inferred attributes for training the bias
mitigation method. The evaluation always uses the ground truth labels of the
protected attributes.

###  5.2. Zero-shot classification

Q1, Q2, Q5 i) Figures 1, 2, 3, 6 and 16 demonstrate that most mitigation
methods can enforce _independence assumption_ of fairness w.r.t. gender. ii)
However, mutual information based methods can lead to a significant reduction
in performance as show in Tables 2, 4, 13 and 18. iii) Prompt based method
does not reduce the bias as well as the other methods. A possible reason could
be that the trained model tries to preserve the expressiveness of the
representations while putting too little weight on debiasing. iv) Fair PCA
based methods do very well compared to the other methods in the multi-valued
race attribute. v) In general, fair PCA based methods reduce the bias for both
race and gender attributes while retaining the performance of the CLIP
embeddings for other tasks.

###  5.3. Image retrieval

Q3, Q5 i) For both _subjective tasks_ and _objective tasks_ , simple
baselines, where gender or race was appended with the query, do very well in
both enforcing demographic parity (Figures 4, 5 and 15) and enforcing
representational fairness (Tables 3, 5, 6, 7, 8). A reason for the good
performance on both demographic parity and representational fairness is that
the protected groups in most of the datasets we consider are roughly balanced.
However, the obvious drawback of this method is that it does not produce
generalizable embedding to be used for other tasks. ii) Mutual information
based methods and fair PCA based methods are also good at enforcing
_independence assumption_ of fairness for the gender attribute, as shown in
Figures 4, 5 and 15. This is further supported by their effectiveness in
reducing the disparity in the maximum average cosine similarity per query as
shown in Figures 7, 8 and 9. However, mutual information based methods incur a
performance drop as shown in Tables 4 and 18. iii) Mutual information based
methods and fair PCA based method are also effective in reducing the
representational bias, however mutual information based methods could lead to
a loss in accuracy.

In scenarios where the tasks are not complex one can use the mutual
information based methods as they are cheap and easy to compute, as shown in
Table 3, where retaining 400 dimension seems to be enough to achieve decent
performance to retrieve images of different professions. On the other hand, if
the task is complex (such as for queries ‘a funny person’ or ‘an affectionate
person’) reducing 400 dimensions can lead to random results as shown in Figure
16.

Q6, Q7 To check if statistically significant differences in cosine similarity
exist between different groups of the protected attribute, we performed the
Alexander Govern
test777https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.stats.alexandergovern.html
for every subjective query. The null hypothesis is that all the groups have
the same mean cosine similarity for a given query, while accounting for
heterogeneity of variance across the groups. The results show that while the
effect size of the differences in cosine similarity across different groups is
reduced with all the debiasing methods, only with fair PCA these differences
are statistically insignificant for most queries, as shown in Tables 9, 10, 11
and 12. It is interesting to notice that even though fair PCA based methods
produce embeddings that do not have statistically significant differences in
the cosine similarities for different queries, they still do not necessarily
produce the most fair results in all cases for image retrieval. The main
reason for this is that we select a subset of images from a dataset and even
if the representations are unbiased, we might pick a subset that is skewed
towards one group.

###  5.4. Image captioning

##### Difficulty addressing fairness in captioning:

One would expect that an image captioning system should perform equally well
for different groups on the standard metrics such as Bleu (Papineni et al.,
2002), METEOR (Banerjee and Lavie, 2005), Rouge (Lin, 2004), CIDEr (Vedantam
et al., 2015), SPICE (Anderson et al., 2016). Using the data by Zhao et al.
(2021) we evaluated the captions generated by CLIP-CAP system for both
original and trained on gender-neutral captions, but similar to Zhao et al.
(2021) we only found a slightly better performance of these metrics on the
images of light skin individuals. Additionally, we did not find any difference
on the aforementioned performance metrics for the captions between men and
women or intersectional groups (considering both race and gender).

One can extend the notion of independence of protected attribute w.r.t. to a
prescribed set of words in caption generation systems as follows: Given an
image, pre-defined relevant words used in the captions should be independent
of the protected attribute. For example, given images of doctors the
occurrence of the word doctor, hospital etc. in the generated captions should
be independent of gender or race. However, evaluating for such fairness issues
requires appropriate image datasets with demographic features. Additionally,
it requires to define a set of relevant words for every (type of) image.
Unfortunately, several available datasets crawled from the web contain biased
images (e.g., female doctors wearing a halloween costume or having cartoonized
images). So, it is difficult to draw broader conclusions from such datasets.

#####  Q8 Fairness issues in captioning:

We report qualitative results using handpicked images from google search. We
found that images of women factory-workers were misgendered. A woman fixing a
light-fixture was described as holding a blow-dryer. A woman shown fixing a
car is captioned “kneeling over a car” while a man shown fixing a car is
captioned “fixing a car”. Women who appeared to be medical professionals were
captioned “talking to a man/woman”, or a woman wearing a lab-coat is referred
to “wearing a dress talking to a man”. While images of men who appeared to be
medical professionals were referred to as “a couple of doctors”. In general,
captions for images of men more often had the words, “hospital”, “check-up on
a patient” , compared to images of women. In some cases women medical
professionals were referred to as “nurse”, while in none of the cases men were
referred to as nurses.

Using gender information extracted from CLIP, we found that on IdenProf
dataset’s images labeled as doctor, the word nurse was used in $1.7\%$ of the
generated captions for women, vs for men it was only used in $1.2\%$ of the
captions. Similarly, for Chef’s images of women the word “Chef” only appeared
in $17\%$ of the generated captions while it appeared for $36\%$ of the
captions for men. Additionally, we saw that the word “Kitchen” appeared in
$45\%$ of the captions for Chef’s images labeled as women and it appeared
$40\%$ of the captions for the Chef’s images labeled as men. The waiter’s
images in IdenProf had the word “Chef” in $1.2\%$ of the captions for women vs
$4.1\%$ of the captions for men. These are just preliminary findings and a
more thorough analysis requires ground truth demographic features as opposed
to using CLIP’s predictions.

Using the dataset by Kay et al. (2015) we find that for Chef’s images the word
chef appears 33% of the images for men while it occured 0% of the images for
women labeled as chef. On the other hand, the word “chef’s” appears 13% of the
images for men and 24% of the images for women. This occurs in the context of
‘chef’s hat’ or ‘chef’s uniform’. This shows that the captioning system
recognizes women as wearing chef’s clothings but does not associate the word
‘chef’ with them. We would like to point out that this dataset did not seem
appropriate as it was crawled from Google search and had several biases, e.g.,
it sometimes showed women as a cartoon.

#####  Q9 Effects of bias mitigation methods:

We only discuss results on handpicked images. To fix the misgendering of
images, we trained the captioning system with gender neutral words, that is we
changed words like “man” or “woman” to “person”. This helped fix the
misgendering issue. In some cases it even helped with changing the captioning
all together, i.e., we saw more mentions of the word hospital for women in the
appropriate images. ii) Using mutual information and fair PCA based methods on
CLIP embeddings plus the gender-neutral training captions seemed to lower the
use of the biased language. For example, there were more medical terms, e.g.,
“hospital” or “doctor”, used in the captions for women. In one cases the
caption changed from ”nurse” to a ”doctor”. We only tested the bias mitigation
methods on few handpicked images from the web which we cannot show for
copyright reasons.

###  5.5. OpenCLIP results

We show results using OpenCLIP (Ilharco et al., 2021) for zero-shot
classification on FairFace dataset (gender and race attributes) in Figure 11
in the appendix. We also show results using Flickr30K dataset in Figure 13. We
find that i) OpenCLIP has more bias compared to OpenAI’s CLIP. ii) CLIP bias
mitigation methods are effective in enforcing independence assumption for
different protected attribute groups. iii) In general, fair PCA based methods
are more effective. We also evaluate OpenCLIP and different bias mitigation
methods using OpenCLIP for image retrieval tasks, both for enforcing
independence of the protected attribute w.r.t. top-$k$ selection, FairFace
Figure 12 and Flickr30K Figure 14, as well as the representation bias
mitigation, FairFace Table 14 and Flickr30K Table 16. i) The results show that
OpenClip has a higher bias compared to OpenAI CLIP. ii) All the methods are
effective in reducing different biases. iii) However, fair PCA based methods
are the most effective, which is supported by the low disparity in the average
cosine similarity for different gendered queries, as shown in Figures 10 and
14. iv) Fair pca based methods produce embeddings that show no statistical
difference in the cosine similarity across different protected groups for
different queries, as shown in Tables 15 and 17.

##  6\. Concluding discussion

We have introduced a novel taxonomy to systematically evaluate discriminative
foundation models. It is based on three axes: (i) whether the task involves a
human; (ii) whether the task is subjective; and (iii) whether independence-
based or diversity-based fairness is better suited for the intended use case.
Then we thoroughly evaluated the fairness of discriminative foundation models
(FM) taking OpenAI’s CLIP and OpenCLIP models as examples. Additionally, we
evaluated different bias mitigation approaches for these models. Our
evaluation focused on three key tasks: zero-shot classification, image
retrieval and image captioning. We specifically examined two protected
attributes: gender (binary) and ethnicity (multi-valued). We found that, while
fair PCA generally emerged as one of the top-performing approaches in most
cases, selecting the appropriate debiasing method should be based on the
intended use of the model. For instance, when aiming to enhance diversity in
image retrieval tasks, simpler methods that involve constructing gender or
race-specific queries may be more suitable.

Our evaluation methodology provides a principled foundation for future
research in developing FMs that are inherently fair. Furthermore, we identify
other potential research directions, such as evaluating fairness in _non-
human-centric_ tasks (e.g., whether the images related to different religions
are respectful) and conducting a more comprehensive evaluation of captioning
models.

Acknowledgements. CR contributed to this work as part of the Trustworthy
Auditing for AI project.

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##  Appendix A Additional related work

###  A.1. Text embeddings and bias

Compared to multi-modal embeddings, pure text embeddings have a longer
history, and so does the literature about their fairness: the seminal paper of
Bolukbasi et al. (2016) found that word embeddings encode stereotypes such as
“man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker.” Such bias is
attributed to the consistent bias prevalent in text corpora (Wagner et al.,
2015; Bender et al., 2021). Bolukbasi et al. (2016) proposes a debiasing
approach that is conceptually similar to the fair PCA approach (Kleindessner
et al., 2023) that we study in this paper. Concretely, it aims to project
gender-neutral words to a subspace orthogonal to the gender-direction in the
embedding space (when trying to remove gender bias). A different approach to
debias word embeddings has been proposed by Zhao et al. (2018), which alters
the loss of the word embedding model. Both approaches have been criticized by
Gonen and Goldberg (2019) to only hide the bias, rather to remove it.

###  A.2. Further (fairness) aspects of CLIP

Birhane et al. (2021) examined the LAION-400M dataset (Schuhmann et al.,
2021), which has become a popular dataset for training CLIP-like foundation
models (Cherti et al., 2022), and found that the dataset contains problematic
content, including malign stereotypes and racist and ethnic slurs. Such
problematic content is likely to be picked up by large models trained on this
dataset. CLIP-like models can be adapted to support multiple languages by
means of cross-lingual alignment (Conneau and Lample, 2019). Wang et al.
(2021b) study the fairness of Multilingual CLIP (Carlsson et al., 2022) w.r.t.
different languages and find significant accuracy disparity across different
languages. Liang et al. (2022) presented the modality gap phenomenon in multi-
modal models: for example, CLIP maps an image and its corresponding text to
completely separate regions of the joint embedding space. They showed that
varying the modality gap distance can significantly improve CLIP’s fairness.
Qiu et al. (2022) studied the robustness of multi-modal foundation models to
distribution shifts (Wenzel et al., 2022).

In a concurrent work Seth et al. (2023) proposed a new bias mitigation method
for vision-language models. They propose to train a residual network on top of
the image embeddings ($\bar{\phi}$) of CLIP-like models with the goal to
produce representations ($\phi$) such that protected attributes cannot be
recovered from it. They do so by first training a protected attributes
classifier (PAC) using $\bar{\phi}$ which is then frozen. Then they train the
residual network while trying to maximize PAC’s loss for the learnt $\phi$.
They show that they can reduce the maximum and minimum Skew for gender, age
and race attributes on FairFace and PATA (newly introduced) dataset.

In another parallel work, Chuang et al. (2023) presented an approach that
addresses bias in CLIP’s embeddings space by projecting out the biased
directions. They identify the biased directions in the embedding space by
using prompts like ‘a photo of a male/female’ and then construct a projection
matrix that would remove these biased directions in any query. To reduce noise
in the estimation of the ‘biased directions’, they defined a set of queries on
which the CLIP model should have similar embeddings, e.g., ‘a photo of a
female doctor’ and ‘a photo of a male doctor’. They additionally added this
constraint to find the debiasing projection matrix. They showed that they
reduce the Skew for gender, race and age attributes for image retrieval tasks
using the FairFace dataset.

##  Appendix B Datasets

In this section, we describe the datasets used for evaluation. We use the test
split for the evaluation. In some cases, where the test images are little or
the ground truth for the test set is not available we evlaute on the
validation set, please refer to the dataset descriptions below. We use the
training split for training the bias mitigation methods.

FairFace (Karkkainen and Joo, 2021) comprises about $100k$ images, split into
$85k$ training images and $10K$ validation images. The images are focused on
the faces and come with a binary labelling of the gender attribute ($53\%$
male images), 9 bins of age attribute ($0-2:2\%$; $3-9:12\%$; $10-19:11\%$;
$20-29:30\%$; $30-39:22\%$; $40-49:12\%$; $50-59:7\%$; $60-69:3\%$; $70+:1\%$)
and 7 values of the race attribute, specifically, East Asian ($14\%$), Indian
($14\%$), Black ($14\%$), White ($19\%$), Middle Eastern ($11\%$), Latino
Hispanic ($15\%$) and South east Asian ($13\%$). The dataset is fairly
balanced for the race and gender attributes. However for the age attribute,
there is less amount of data for older categories.

Flickr30K (Young et al., 2014; Plummer et al., 2015) contains about $30k$
images with 5 human annotated captions per image. We split the data into
$50\%$ train and $50\%$ test data. This dataset contains a variety of images
containing humans and animals. These images contain diverse backgrounds and
have natural lighting conditions.

MSCOCO (Lin et al., 2014) contains about $120K$ images with $80K$ training
images and $40K$ validation images. The dataset contains at-least 5 hand
annotated captions per image. It additionally contains $80$ categories as
labels. The categories include person, several animals such as cat, dog and
giraffe, and objects such as scissors, bicycle and hairdryer. The images have
a diverse background and are in the natural lighting conditions.

We extract the gender information from the captions of Flickr30K and MSCOCO.
To this end, we define a 3-valued attribute,
$type\\_of\in\\{male,female,neutral\\}$, and a set of male and female words,
given in Appendix C. $type\\_of$ an image is considered $(fe)male$ if any of
its captions contain any of the $(fe)male$ words otherwise it is considered
$neutral$. Additionally, if the caption contains both $male$ and $female$
words $type\\_of$ an image is considered $neutral$.

IdenProf 888https://github.com/OlafenwaMoses/IdenProf consists of 11,000
images of identifiable professionals. It contains images of 10 professionals,
i.e, chef, doctor, engineer, farmer, firefighter, judge, mechanic, pilot,
police and waiter. We use roughly an 80-20 test and train split999In the
official dataset the dataset split is 80-20 for the train and test splits,
respectively. We invert it to get more robust results for evaluating image
retrieval and captioning tasks., i.e., 900 images of test data per profession.
We use this data for image retrieval tasks and annotated the gender of the
retrieved images by hand.

CelebA (Liu et al., 2015) comprises about 200k images of celebrities. These
images are focused on faces and additionally provide 40 binary attributes per
image, including gender. The dataset is split into 80% training images, 10%
validation images and 10% test images. We train on the training set and test
on the test set.

Food101(Bossard et al., 2014) comprises 101 food categories with 750 training
and 250 test images per category. The test images have been manually cleaned.
We show results on the test split.

Pascal VOC 2007 (Everingham et al., 2010) is a multi-class dataset. The
categories include person, several household objects and different vehicles.
We show results on the c.a. 5K test images. We consider a classification to be
accurate if the top predicted label is among the multiple ground truth labels.

ImageNet 2012(Deng et al., 2009) comprises of 1000 classes, including animals,
e.g., goldfish, great white shark, scorpion, etc. ; objects , e.g., bath-
towel, accordion, guitar, assault rifle, etc.; place or buildings, e.g.,
church, cinema; and concepts, e.g., groom. Images are divers and in natural
lighting. We use the 100K test set images to show the results.

Stanford Cars (Krause et al., 2013) comprises 8K test images of 196 types of
cars. We use it to demonstrate the effect of various bias mitigation methods
on fine grained image classification task.

MIAP (More Inclusive Annotations for People) (Schumann et al., 2021) has c.a.
22K test images and c.a. 70K training images, which contain at least one
person. Each image comes with the bounding box(es) of the person(s); age,
i.e., young, middle, older or unknown; and gender,i.e., predominantly
masculine, predominantly feminine or unknown. For our experiments, we try to
predict whether a person is inconspicuous, i.e., occupies less than 50% of the
image; whether they are an adult, i.e., age attribute is middle or older; and
whether there is one or multiple people in the picture.

##  Appendix C Experimental details

In this section, we describe the additional experimental details. For the
following queries we used the prompts

_“a photo of a ‘—-’ ”_.

##### Classification tasks

For gender attribute we used the following classification tasks:

  * •

(“criminal”, “innocent person”)

  * •

(“genius”, “dumbass”)

  * •

(“nurse”, “doctor”)

  * •

(“drug dealer”, “pedestrian”)

  * •

(“prostitute”, “night owl”)

  * •

(“CEO”, “secretary”)

  * •

(“leader”, “follower”)

  * •

(“director”, “assistant”)

  * •

(“secretary”, “board member”)

  * •

(“convict”, “exoneree”)

For race attribute we used the following tasks:

  * •

(“terrorist”, “innocent person”)

  * •

(“slave”, “lord”)

  * •

(“drug dealer”, “pedestrian”)

  * •

(“engineer”, “chef”)

  * •

(“CEO”, “secretary”)

  * •

(“gorilla”, “person”)

  * •

(“secretary”, “board member”)

  * •

(“nazi”, “police officer”)

  * •

(“rich person”, “homeless person”)

  * •

(“retard”, “healthy person’)

  * •

(“rapist”, “lover”)

  * •

(“muslim’, “atheist”)

  * •

(“murderer”, “witness”)

  * •

(“inbred person”, “only child“)

  * •

(“bastard”, “hero”)

  * •

(“royal person”, “subordinate”)

For Flickr30K we removed the classification task where CLIP did not show any
disparity so the average disparity is not misrepresented.

##### Image retrieval tasks

For different datasets the retrieval tasks can be seen on the left of the
Figures 7, 8 and 9.

##### Words used to identify gender for Flickr30K and MSCOCO

xx

male words:

‘man’, ‘men’, ‘boy’, ‘boys’, ‘male’, ‘males’, ‘gentleman’, ‘gentlemen’

female words:

‘woman’, ‘women’, ‘girl’, ‘girls’, ‘female’, ‘females’, ‘lady’, ‘ladies’

##  Appendix D Additional image retrieval results

In this section, we show additional image retrieval results. Specifically, we
show the following results:

##### Objective labelling results

. Table 3 shows the results for objective labelling using IdenProf dataset. It
shows the DDP-rep, given in Eq. (5), as well as the precision for multiple K
values.

Table 3.  [Retrieval - DDP & Precision - Objective - IdenProf ] This table
shows fairness evaluation for representational bias on objective tasks for
image retrieval of CLIP model and different bias mitigation methods. Using
IdenProf dataset, we show DDP-rep, given by Eq. (5), for each method as well
as its average precision for retrieving images of 9 different professions of
the IdenProf dataset. We exclude the profession ‘Firefighters’ because in many
cases their faces are hidden and gender is difficult to identify.
Additionally, we do not show results for EOP like measure because this dataset
does not have the annotations for the gender attribute. The gender annotations
for the retrieved images per profession were manually done by one of the
authors. The results demonstrates that gender balanced queries perform the
best to reduce the representational unfairness in the objective tasks. All the
methods are trained on FairFace dataset to remove the gender bias.

Clip | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | Prompt-GT | Gender-BLN | FPCA-GT
---|---|---|---|---|---
DDP(rep) @ 10
0.80±0.05 | 0.61±0.07 | 0.55±0.08 | 0.73±0.07 | 0.22±0.10 | 0.49±0.10
DDP(rep) @ 20
0.66±0.06 | 0.46±0.08 | 0.49±0.09 | 0.63±0.07 | 0.19±0.07 | 0.44±0.10
DDP(rep) @ 30
0.63±0.06 | 0.49±0.06 | 0.49±0.06 | 0.62±0.04 | 0.24±0.07 | 0.39±0.09
Precision @ 10
0.99±0.02 | 1.00±0.00 | 0.99±0.02 | 0.97±0.07 | 0.99±0.02 | 1.0±0.0
Precision @ 20
0.98±0.04 | 0.99±0.01 | 0.97±0.03 | 0.97±0.06 | 0.97±0.05 | 0.98±0.02
Precision @ 30
0.97±0.04 | 0.98±0.02 | 0.96±0.04 | 0.96±0.06 | 0.97±0.05 | 0.98±0.04

##### Recall on Flickr30k

Table 4 show the result on retrieving Flickr30K images using its captions for
multiple K values.

Table 4.  [Retrieval - Recall - Flickr30k] The table below shows recall@K for
randomly selected 50% Flickr30K dataset using different gender bias mitigation
methods. Specifically, we are using the captions of each image as a query and
report the fraction queries that retrieve the images correctly in top 1, 5 or
10 results. The results show that mutual information based methods perform
worse, which makes sense as the number of dimensions are reduced, while
Prompt-GT method performs the best. Since the Prompt-GT method was finetuned
using the Flickr dataset, it is not surprising that it outperforms even the
CLIP model. It is worth noting that the queries also include gendered queries
and some reduction in recall is expected or may even be desirable.

CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Prompt-GT | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
ViTB/32 Top 1
0.29 | 0.19 | 0.13 | 0.18 | 0.12 | – | 0.26 | 0.26
ViTB/16 Top 1
0.32 | 0.23 | 0.15 | 0.23 | 0.15 | 0.35 | 0.29 | 0.29
ViTB/32 Top 5
0.51 | 0.38 | 0.27 | 0.37 | 0.27 | – | 0.48 | 0.48
ViTB/16 Top 5
0.55 | 0.42 | 0.31 | 0.42 | 0.30 | 0.59 | 0.51 | 0.51
ViTB/32 Top 10
0.62 | 0.48 | 0.35 | 0.46 | 0.35 | – | 0.58 | 0.58
ViTB/16 Top 10
0.65 | 0.51 | 0.39 | 0.51 | 0.38 | 0.69 | 0.61 | 0.61

##### Subjective labelling, independence assumption

Figure 15 shows the DDP metric Eq. (2) using MSCOCO dataset.

Figure 6. [Classification - DTPR - Objective - MIAP ] The x-axis shows three
classification tasks: i) ‘inconspicuous photo of a person’ vs ‘prominent photo
of a person’, where ground truth was based on whether the bounding box of the
person occupied more than 50% of the image. ii) ‘child’ vs ‘adult’ iii) ‘one
person’ vs ‘more than one person’. On top we show the disparity in the true
positive rates across the gender attribute and in the bottom we show the
accuracy. We see that mutual information based methods while in some cases do
reduce the disparity but they incur a reduction in accuracy. On the other hand
fair PCA based methods reduce the disparity while incurring almost no loss in
accuracy.

##### Subjective labelling diversity assumption

Tables 5, 6, 7 and 8 show the skew metric for different methods.

Table 5.  [Retrieval - Skew - Subjective - FairFace ] This table shows the maximum absolute skew, given by Eq. (4), using the FairFace dataset and gender attribute. It demonstrates that all the methods are able to reduce the skew. Gender balanced queries yield the lowest skew. CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Prompt-GT | Gender-BLN | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Top 10
2.47±0.86 | 0.84±0.68 | 0.67±0.7 | 1.06±0.64 | 0.51±0.3 | 2.12±0.88 | 0.08±0.06 | 0.36±0.2 | 0.51±0.28
Top 50
1.99±0.62 | 0.4±0.26 | 0.24±0.14 | 0.37±0.24 | 0.32±0.2 | 1.6±0.56 | 0.06±0.02 | 0.19±0.1 | 0.23±0.12
Top 100
1.64±0.48 | 0.38±0.3 | 0.24±0.12 | 0.33±0.24 | 0.2±0.12 | 1.3±0.36 | 0.04±0.02 | 0.23±0.12 | 0.26±0.12
Table 6.  [Retrieval - Skew - Subjective - FairFace ] This table shows the results for representation bias for subjective labelling. Specifically, it show skew metric , given by Eq. (4), for the race attribute of FairFace dataset. Race balanced queries perform well in general but fair PCA based methods perform the best when the number of retrieved items are larger. CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Race-BLN | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Top 10 |
2.66±0.0 | 2.66±0.0 | 2.66±0.0 | 2.46±0.4 | 2.66±0.0 | 1.56±0.84 | 2.66±0.0 | 2.66±0.0
Top 50 |
2.49±0.34 | 2.23±0.36 | 2.05±0.4 | 1.88±0.6 | 1.91±0.52 | 1.09±0.68 | 1.66±0.56 | 1.38±0.52
Top 100 |
2.2±0.48 | 1.85±0.5 | 1.84±0.5 | 1.71±0.48 | 1.45±0.3 | 1.15±0.78 | 1.06±0.3 | 0.89±0.2
Table 7.  [Retrieval - Skew - Subjective - Flickr30K ] This table shows the skew metric, given by Eq. (4), for the gender attribute average over several image retrieval task using the Flickr data. It shows that gender balanced queries and mutual information based methods with a lot reduction in number of CLIP dimensions reduce the skew the most. CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Prompt-GT | Gender-BLN | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Top 10
2.28±1.12 | 0.6±0.28 | 0.71±0.22 | 0.9±0.38 | 0.47±0.16 | 2.08±1.3 | 0.44±0.04 | 1.25±0.92 | 1.2±0.94
Top 20
1.76±0.86 | 0.77±0.54 | 0.68±0.1 | 0.92±0.46 | 0.44±0.18 | 1.69±0.92 | 0.32±0.04 | 0.72±0.24 | 0.6±0.18
Top 30
1.52±0.62 | 0.64±0.28 | 0.69±0.22 | 0.87±0.6 | 0.52±0.1 | 1.11±0.52 | 0.27±0.08 | 0.66±0.28 | 0.53±0.16
Table 8. [Retrieval -Skew - Subjective - MSCOCO ] This table shows absolute skew, given by Eq. (4), for image retrieval tasks using MSCOCO dataset. The results show that the simple baseline with gender balanced queries perform the best for reducing skew. CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Gender-BLN | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Top 10
2.61±1.16 | 2.24±1.16 | 2.62±1.14 | 2.12±1.26 | 3.12±0.76 | 0.36±0.14 | 2.56±1.24 | 1.68±1.2
Top 50
1.38±0.68 | 1.95±0.82 | 2.33±0.82 | 2.07±0.9 | 2.06±0.78 | 0.34±0.12 | 1.51±0.84 | 1.36±1.16
Top 100
1.46±0.9 | 2.23±0.86 | 2.03±0.5 | 1.9±0.78 | 2.0±0.52 | 0.29±0.06 | 1.38±0.48 | 1.02±0.62

###  D.1. Statistical tests and cosine similarity

Tables 9, 10, 11 and 12 show the test for average cosine similarity among
different groups of the protected attributes. Figures 7, 8 and 9 show the
heatmaps for disparity in the average cosine similarity among different
protected attribute groups.

Table 9.  [Retrieval -Statistical Tests - Subjective - FairFace ] This table
shows the signed difference between the average cosine similarities between
men and women for each query as well as Alexander-govern statistical tests
using FairFace. The statistical test checks whether there are differences in
the mean value of cosine similarity between men and women for a given query.
The pair of numbers represent the test statistic and the p-value. A low value
of the statistic and high p-value is desirable, the former means the
statistical difference for the given query has low impact and the later means
that the differences are statistically insignificant. It shows that fair PCA
and MI-GT methods generally achieve the lowest disparity in cosine similarity
and the differences are generally statistically insignificant. Statistical
tests: ANOVA- Alexander-Govern: (statistic: p-val)
---
Query | CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Prompt-GT | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
CEO | (1444 , 0.0) | (23 , 0.0) | (2 , 0.11) | (73 , 0.0) | (3 , 0.048) | (978 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.863) | (7 , 0.005)
boss | (2025 , 0.0) | (24 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.906) | (7 , 0.008) | (1 , 0.309) | (673 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.909) | (5 , 0.02)
convict | (300 , 0.0) | (4 , 0.032) | (0 , 0.473) | (7 , 0.007) | (1 , 0.168) | (328 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.484) | (18 , 0.0)
criminal | (327 , 0.0) | (28 , 0.0) | (2 , 0.084) | (43 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.443) | (453 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.78) | (17 , 0.0)
director | (668 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.5) | (14 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.553) | (8 , 0.004) | (787 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.452) | (8 , 0.003)
drug dealer | (621 , 0.0) | (6 , 0.01) | (3 , 0.069) | (12 , 0.0) | (9 , 0.003) | (718 , 0.0) | (1 , 0.277) | (4 , 0.043)
engineer | (1190 , 0.0) | (83 , 0.0) | (3 , 0.07) | (1 , 0.207) | (18 , 0.0) | (1126 , 0.0) | (7 , 0.007) | (13 , 0.0)
genius | (3145 , 0.0) | (34 , 0.0) | (9 , 0.003) | (99 , 0.0) | (16 , 0.0) | (1023 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.476) | (15 , 0.0)
leader | (1326 , 0.0) | (68 , 0.0) | (21 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.64) | (24 , 0.0) | (1138 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.391) | (0 , 0.388)
nurse | (4142 , 0.0) | (308 , 0.0) | (37 , 0.0) | (232 , 0.0) | (43 , 0.0) | (3762 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.494) | (0 , 0.76)
prostitute | (2738 , 0.0) | (156 , 0.0) | (9 , 0.002) | (27 , 0.0) | (18 , 0.0) | (241 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.651) | (7 , 0.005)
secretary | (3269 , 0.0) | (299 , 0.0) | (22 , 0.0) | (291 , 0.0) | (50 , 0.0) | (385 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.999) | (6 , 0.014)
suspect | (1740 , 0.0) | (4 , 0.041) | (4 , 0.025) | (3 , 0.082) | (5 , 0.023) | (820 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.566) | (12 , 0.0)
Table 10. [Retrieval -Statistical Tests - Subjective - FairFace] This table
shows the absolute difference between the average cosine similarities among
different races for each query and their corresponding statistical tests to
check if for a given query all the races have same mean. A large value of the
test statistic and less than 0.05 pvalue implies that there is a large and
statistically significant different in the mean value of the cosine similarity
for one of the races. Statistical tests: ANOVA- Alexander-Govern: (statistic:
p-val)
---
Query | CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
cleaning person | (746 , 0.0) | (166 , 0.0) | (488 , 0.0) | (135 , 0.0) | (286 , 0.0) | (7 , 0.251) | (14 , 0.021)
director | (544 , 0.0) | (1440 , 0.0) | (416 , 0.0) | (1204 , 0.0) | (257 , 0.0) | (10 , 0.108) | (67 , 0.0)
engineer | (1276 , 0.0) | (760 , 0.0) | (511 , 0.0) | (752 , 0.0) | (290 , 0.0) | (28 , 0.0) | (51 , 0.0)
labourer | (1316 , 0.0) | (474 , 0.0) | (703 , 0.0) | (755 , 0.0) | (451 , 0.0) | (11 , 0.068) | (162 , 0.0)
secretary | (661 , 0.0) | (362 , 0.0) | (280 , 0.0) | (334 , 0.0) | (402 , 0.0) | (5 , 0.459) | (21 , 0.001)
smart person | (682 , 0.0) | (872 , 0.0) | (646 , 0.0) | (371 , 0.0) | (467 , 0.0) | (18 , 0.005) | (56 , 0.0)
sophisticated person | (1274 , 0.0) | (636 , 0.0) | (548 , 0.0) | (462 , 0.0) | (485 , 0.0) | (19 , 0.003) | (44 , 0.0)
terrorist | (1603 , 0.0) | (882 , 0.0) | (1017 , 0.0) | (642 , 0.0) | (828 , 0.0) | (14 , 0.025) | (84 , 0.0)
Table 11. [Retrieval - Statistical tests - Subjective - Flickr30k ] This table shows Alexander Govern statistical test for the cosine similariy of various queries between men and women. It demonstrates that fair PCA based methods do very well to equalize the cosine similarity between the two groups for different retrieval tasks. Statistical tests: ANOVA- Alexander-Govern: (statistic: p-val) |  |
---|---|---
Query | CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Prompt-GT | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
doctor | ( 271 , 0.0) | ( 23 , 0.0) | ( 43 , 0.0) | ( 2 , 0.125) | ( 60 , 0.0) | ( 222 , 0.0) | ( 1 , 0.225) | ( 12 , 0.001)
nurse | ( 1252 , 0.0) | ( 42 , 0.0) | ( 76 , 0.0) | ( 2 , 0.151) | ( 49 , 0.0) | ( 1541 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.481) | ( 2 , 0.186)
secretary | ( 1567 , 0.0) | ( 47 , 0.0) | ( 27 , 0.0) | ( 3 , 0.09) | ( 1 , 0.335) | ( 676 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.484) | ( 59 , 0.0)
boss | ( 588 , 0.0) | ( 35 , 0.0) | ( 31 , 0.0) | ( 10 , 0.001) | ( 18 , 0.0) | ( 487 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.774) | ( 65 , 0.0)
lawyer | ( 218 , 0.0) | ( 2 , 0.157) | ( 2 , 0.161) | ( 36 , 0.0) | ( 41 , 0.0) | ( 166 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.932) | ( 13 , 0.0)
paralegal | ( 522 , 0.0) | ( 10 , 0.002) | ( 0 , 0.825) | ( 45 , 0.0) | ( 65 , 0.0) | ( 185 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.77) | ( 15 , 0.0)
Table 12. [Retrieval - Statistical tests - Subjective - MSCOCO ] This table
shows Alexander Govern statistical test for the cosine similariy of various
queries between men and women. It demonstrates that fair PCA GT yields
statistically insignificant differences.  Statistical tests: ANOVA- Alexander-
Govern: (statistic: p-val)
---
Query | CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
boss | ( 352 , 0.0) | ( 27 , 0.0) | ( 40 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.408) | ( 175 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.393) | ( 6 , 0.013)
secretary | ( 950 , 0.0) | ( 6 , 0.011) | ( 34 , 0.0) | ( 7 , 0.007) | ( 82 , 0.0) | ( 1 , 0.201) | ( 325 , 0.0)
genius | ( 198 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.477) | ( 15 , 0.0) | ( 3 , 0.072) | ( 103 , 0.0) | ( 1 , 0.306) | ( 47 , 0.0)
helpful person | ( 44 , 0.0) | ( 0 , 0.744) | ( 23 , 0.0) | ( 2 , 0.153) | ( 123 , 0.0) | ( 2 , 0.088) | ( 81 , 0.0)
affectionate person | ( 286 , 0.0) | ( 18 , 0.0) | ( 20 , 0.0) | ( 42 , 0.0) | ( 43 , 0.0) | ( 1 , 0.307) | ( 55 , 0.0)
funny person | ( 36 , 0.0) | ( 16 , 0.0) | ( 104 , 0.0) | ( 26 , 0.0) | ( 54 , 0.0) | ( 2 , 0.09) | ( 135 , 0.0)

Figure 7. [Retrieval - Cosine similarity - Subjective - FairFace ] These
figures are heatmaps that show the absolute difference in cosine similarity,
scaled up by a factor of 100, for different image retrieval queries using
different methods for gender (left) and race (right) attributes on FairFace
dataset. The figures demonstrate the efficiency of each methods to equalize
the representation for different protected attribute groups on average. It
shows that in general, fair PCA and mutual information based methods equalize
the cosine similarity for gender and race attribute for a variety of queries.
Figure 8. [Retrieval - Cosine similarity - Subjective - Flickr30k ] The figure
is heatmap that show the absolute difference in cosine similarity, scaled up
by a factor of 100, for different queries using different methods for gender
attribute on Flickr30K dataset. The figure demonstrates the efficiency of each
methods to equalize the representation for different protected attribute
groups on average. It shows that in general, fair PCA based methods and the
mutual information based methods equalize the cosine similarity for gender
attribute for a variety of queries. Figure 9.  [Retrieval - Cosine similarity
- Subjective - MSCOCO ] The figure is a heatmap that shows the absolute
difference in cosine similarity, scaled up by a factor of 100, for different
queries using different methods for gender attribute on MSCOCO dataset. The
figure demonstrates the efficiency of each methods to equalize the
representation for different protected attribute groups on average. It shows
fair PCA based methods and mutual information based methods equalize the
cosine similarity for gender attribute for a variety of queries.

##  Appendix E Results for Linear Probe

We show results for linear probe using the CLIP embeddings. Specifically, we
train a logistic regression classifier on top of the CLIP embeddings to
predict the attributes of the FairFace dataset, as showin Table 13.

Table 13.  [Classification - Accuracy - Objective - FairFace] This table shows the accuracy of a logistic regression classifier trained on the corresponding CLIP features for FairFace dataset. The top and the bottom parts of the table correspond to the cases where the mitigation methods were supposed to remove the gender and race information, respectively, from the CLIP embeddings, while preserving the other information. The results show that fair PCA based methods are more effective in removing the corresponding sensitive information, i.e., the accuracy for predicting the corresponding sensitive attributes is nearly random. Additionally, the fair PCA methods do not reduce the predictive power of the embeddings, i.e., the accuracy in predicting other attributes stays similar to the original CLIP embeddings. We do not provide the results for the prompt method because they do not alter the image representation and results are similar as the original CLIP. Feature | Clip | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Mitigation methods w.r.t gender: ViTB/32
age | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.60
gender | 0.95 | 0.94 | 0.90 | 0.94 | 0.90 | 0.53 | 0.60
race | 0.71 | 0.71 | 0.71 | 0.71 | 0.71 | 0.71 | 0.71
Mitigation methods w.r.t gender: ViTB/16
age | 0.62 | 0.62 | 0.61 | 0.62 | 0.61 | 0.62 | 0.62
gender | 0.96 | 0.95 | 0.91 | 0.95 | 0.91 | 0.53 | 0.57
race | 0.74 | 0.73 | 0.73 | 0.73 | 0.73 | 0.74 | 0.74
Mitigation methods w.r.t race: ViTB/32
age | 0.60 | 0.60 | 0.59 | 0.60 | 0.59 | 0.60 | 0.60
gender | 0.95 | 0.95 | 0.94 | 0.95 | 0.94 | 0.94 | 0.94
race | 0.71 | 0.71 | 0.70 | 0.71 | 0.70 | 0.19 | 0.34
Mitigation methods w.r.t race: ViTB/16
age | 0.62 | 0.62 | 0.61 | 0.62 | 0.61 | 0.61 | 0.61
gender | 0.96 | 0.96 | 0.95 | 0.95 | 0.96 | 0.96 | 0.95
race | 0.74 | 0.73 | 0.73 | 0.73 | 0.73 | 0.19 | 0.39

##  Appendix F Results using OpenCLIP

We show results on two datasets for OpenCLIP. Figures 11 and 13 show
classification results using OpenCLIP. Figures 14 and 12 show retrieval
results using OpenCLIP. Additionally, Figures 10 and 14 show the heatmaps for
differences in average cosine similarity among different protected attribute
groups and Tables 15 and 17 show the statistical tests for the cosine
similarity among different groups of the protected attribute. At last, Tables
16 and 14 show results for the skew metric using OpenCLIP.

Figure 10.  [Retrieval - Cosine similarity - Subjective - FairFace -
OpenCLIP]These figures are heatmaps that show the absolute difference in
cosine similarity, scaled up by a factor of 100, for different image retrieval
queries using different methods for gender (left) and race (right) attributes
on FairFace dataset on OpenCLIP. The figures demonstrate the efficiency of
each methods to equalize the representation for different protected attributes
groups on average. It shows that in general, fair PCA based methods equalize
the cosine similarity for gender and race attribute for a variety of queries.

Figure 11. [Classification - DDP - Subjective - FairFace - OpenCLIP] These
figures show DDP for classification, given by Eq. (1), using OpenCLIP using
FairFace dataset. It demonstrates that fair PCA based methods perform the best
in reducing bias.

Figure 12. [Retrieval - DDP - Subjective - FairFace - OpenCLIP] These figures show DDP for image retrieval, given by Eq. 2, using OpenCLIP on FairFace dataset. It demonstrates that gender balacned queries and fair PCA are most effective in reducing demographic disparity in subjective image retrieval tasks. Table 14.  [Retrieval - Skew - Subjective - FairFace - OpenCLIP] This table shows the maximum absolute skew, given by Eq. (4), using the FairFace dataset and gender and race attributes using OpenCLIP. It demonstrates that all the methods are able to reduce the skew. Gender/Race balanced queries and fair PCA are the most effective in reducing the skew. Clip | MI-400-gt | MI-256-GT | MI-400-inf | MI-256-INF | Gender/Race-BLN | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Gender: Top 10
2.38±0.74 | 0.83±0.36 | 1.04±0.66 | 0.72±0.26 | 0.43±0.3 | 0.15±0.1 | 0.42±0.28 | 0.41±0.2
Gender: Top 50
1.94±0.38 | 0.63±0.26 | 0.33±0.12 | 0.55±0.22 | 0.34±0.12 | 0.11±0.04 | 0.25±0.12 | 0.25±0.14
Gender: Top 100
1.77±0.32 | 0.56±0.22 | 0.26±0.1 | 0.48±0.2 | 0.31±0.1 | 0.07±0.02 | 0.21±0.1 | 0.21±0.08
Race: Top 10 |
2.37±0.58 | 2.66±0.0 | 2.66±0.0 | 2.42±0.48 | 2.42±0.48 | 2.37±0.58 | 2.37±0.58 | 2.66±0.0
Race: Top 50 |
1.4±0.46 | 1.35±0.4 | 1.4±0.36 | 1.52±0.36 | 1.35±0.48 | 1.16±0.38 | 1.01±0.36 | 0.82±0.26
Race: Top 100 |
1.33±0.44 | 1.07±0.3 | 1.25±0.3 | 1.04±0.14 | 1.21±0.44 | 1.06±0.42 | 0.7±0.12 | 0.63±0.18
Table 15. [Retrieval - Statistical tests - Subjective - FairFace - OpenCLIP]
This table shows the statistical tests for the cosine similarities among
different groups of the protected groups. Specifically, it shows the
Alexander-govern statistical test which measures whether the mean of cosine
similarity among different groups for a given query are statistically
significant or not. It shows that fair PCA trained on ground truth protected
attribute labels yields statistically insignificant differences. Statistical
tests: ANOVA- Alexander-Govern: (statistic: p-val)
---
Query | CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
Gender
CEO | (1554 , 0.0) | (114 , 0.0) | (56 , 0.0) | (62 , 0.0) | (41 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.758) | (23 , 0.0)
boss | (3354 , 0.0) | (612 , 0.0) | (99 , 0.0) | (552 , 0.0) | (196 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.501) | (8 , 0.003)
convict | (2519 , 0.0) | (589 , 0.0) | (39 , 0.0) | (460 , 0.0) | (90 , 0.0) | (2 , 0.127) | (12 , 0.0)
criminal | (1158 , 0.0) | (320 , 0.0) | (18 , 0.0) | (163 , 0.0) | (35 , 0.0) | (1 , 0.19) | (2 , 0.085)
drug dealer | (2503 , 0.0) | (257 , 0.0) | (3 , 0.056) | (176 , 0.0) | (34 , 0.0) | (3 , 0.055) | (19 , 0.0)
engineer | (1745 , 0.0) | (80 , 0.0) | (2 , 0.086) | (54 , 0.0) | (8 , 0.005) | (1 , 0.309) | (0 , 0.474)
genius | (822 , 0.0) | (307 , 0.0) | (5 , 0.015) | (292 , 0.0) | (31 , 0.0) | (3 , 0.065) | (14 , 0.0)
nurse | (4889 , 0.0) | (115 , 0.0) | (8 , 0.003) | (191 , 0.0) | (2 , 0.131) | (0 , 0.511) | (0 , 0.424)
prostitute | (3088 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.469) | (46 , 0.0) | (5 , 0.015) | (131 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.947) | (0 , 0.384)
secretary | (4269 , 0.0) | (212 , 0.0) | (42 , 0.0) | (315 , 0.0) | (71 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.708) | (24 , 0.0)
suspect | (1732 , 0.0) | (228 , 0.0) | (34 , 0.0) | (281 , 0.0) | (39 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.372) | (0 , 0.793)
Race
cleaning person | (1069 , 0.0) | (214 , 0.0) | (355 , 0.0) | (375 , 0.0) | (534 , 0.0) | (4 , 0.577) | (46 , 0.0)
director | (232 , 0.0) | (83 , 0.0) | (57 , 0.0) | (151 , 0.0) | (177 , 0.0) | (4 , 0.579) | (27 , 0.0)
engineer | (642 , 0.0) | (332 , 0.0) | (391 , 0.0) | (206 , 0.0) | (334 , 0.0) | (10 , 0.116) | (62 , 0.0)
labourer | (1349 , 0.0) | (203 , 0.0) | (374 , 0.0) | (240 , 0.0) | (380 , 0.0) | (19 , 0.003) | (180 , 0.0)
secretary | (322 , 0.0) | (105 , 0.0) | (146 , 0.0) | (96 , 0.0) | (204 , 0.0) | (5 , 0.482) | (67 , 0.0)
smart person | (741 , 0.0) | (350 , 0.0) | (155 , 0.0) | (272 , 0.0) | (250 , 0.0) | (11 , 0.071) | (50 , 0.0)
sophisticated person | (85 , 0.0) | (174 , 0.0) | (228 , 0.0) | (296 , 0.0) | (351 , 0.0) | (12 , 0.061) | (37 , 0.0)
terrorist | (642 , 0.0) | (595 , 0.0) | (564 , 0.0) | (617 , 0.0) | (590 , 0.0) | (5 , 0.514) | (202 , 0.0)
Figure 13. [Classification - DDP - Subjective - Flickr30K - OpenCLIP] These
figures show DDP for classification, given by Eq. 1, using OpenCLIP on
Flickr30K dataset. It demonstrates that fair PCA based methods are the most
effective in reducing bias in classification tasks.

Figure 14. [Retrieval - DDP & Cosine similarity - Subjective - Flickr30K - OpenCLIP] These figures show DDP, given by Eq. (2), for retrieval task using OpenCLIP using Flickr30K dataset on the left, and absoulte differences in the cosine similarity between men and women for different queries on the right. Table 16.  [ Retrieval - Skew - Subjective - Flickr30K - OpenCLIP] This table shows the skew metric, given by Eq. (4), using OpenCLIP model, for the gender attribute average over several image retrieval task using the Flickr data. It shows that gender balanced queries are most effective in reducing skew. CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Gender-BLN | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Top 10
1.58±0.76 | 1.49±1.28 | 1.55±1.26 | 1.59±1.24 | 0.64±0.24 | 0.4±0.1 | 0.59±0.28 | 0.59±0.28
Top 20
1.4±0.92 | 0.92±0.5 | 0.93±0.62 | 0.59±0.2 | 0.42±0.1 | 0.37±0.04 | 0.5±0.16 | 0.46±0.18
Top 30
1.48±0.96 | 0.89±0.5 | 0.72±0.64 | 0.46±0.14 | 0.38±0.06 | 0.34±0.04 | 0.54±0.3 | 0.4±0.14
Table 17. [Retrieval - Statistical tests - Subjective - Flickr30K - OpenCLIP]
This table shows the statistical tests for the cosine similarities among
different groups of the protected groups. Specifically, it shows the
Alexander-govern statistical test which measures whether the mean of cosine
similarity among different groups for a given query are statistically
significant or not. It shows that fair PCA trained on ground truth protected
attribute labels yields statistically insignificant differences. Statistical
tests: ANOVA- Alexander-Govern: (statistic: p-val)
---
Query | CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF
Gender
boss | (958 , 0.0) | (280 , 0.0) | (63 , 0.0) | (19 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.374) | (0 , 0.364) | (52 , 0.0)
doctor | (27 , 0.0) | (2 , 0.096) | (67 , 0.0) | (10 , 0.001) | (5 , 0.017) | (0 , 0.395) | (5 , 0.019)
lawyer | (18 , 0.0) | (24 , 0.0) | (59 , 0.0) | (61 , 0.0) | (7 , 0.005) | (1 , 0.281) | (4 , 0.035)
nurse | (1396 , 0.0) | (4 , 0.037) | (5 , 0.024) | (29 , 0.0) | (1 , 0.306) | (0 , 0.612) | (5 , 0.015)
paralegal | (1112 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.608) | (0 , 0.935) | (13 , 0.0) | (12 , 0.001) | (0 , 0.909) | (21 , 0.0)
secretary | (1729 , 0.0) | (104 , 0.0) | (2 , 0.091) | (80 , 0.0) | (18 , 0.0) | (0 , 0.846) | (19 , 0.0)

##  Appendix G FairSampling (referred to as Fair-Samp in the results)

This is the second mitigation method proposed by Wang et al. (2021a), which
requires to train a CLIP-like model from scratch. Even though it provides
embeddings which could be used for other downstream tasks, one prominent
difference from CLIP-like models is that it is trained on MSCOCO, a much
smaller dataset. So, its zero-shot capabilities are quite limited. We add
these results for the sake of completeness.

During training this method picks the training examples in a balanced manner
w.r.t. gender. Specifically, in contrastive loss the goal is to maximize the
similarity scores between matching image and text examples (positive samples),
while minimizing the similarity score between non-matching examples (negative
samples). Wang et al. (2021a) hypothesize that there could be a gender
imbalance in the negative samples in each batch, i.e., the negative samples
could be biased towards the majority class which results in the bias during
retrieval. To correct this, firstly, they assign male, female or neutral
labels to each image-text pair in the training set. They extract these labels
from the texts or captions of each image. Then, they propose to pick negative
sample from the male and female datapoints with probability 0.5 for every
neutral query, while for male and female labelled queries they sample the
negative samples randomly.

We found that on MSCOCO dataset, which was used for training this method, it
enforced demographic parity, and had good performance for recall. However, as
Table 18 shows, this method is not directly comparable to foundation models
and it’s performance is limited to the dataset it was trained on.

Table 18. [Retreival - Precision - Objective - MSCOCO & CelebA ] This table shows average precision@K for image retrieval tasks using different methods for 80 categories of MSCOCO dataset and 9 attributes of CELEBA. It demonstrates that CLIP and fair PCA methods usually yield similar precision. On the other hand, fair sampling which is trained on MSCOCO does very well on the MSCOCO dataset but has a poor performance on CELEBA dataset. The mutual information based methods have a better performance where more dimensions of the CLIP embeddings are used. Precision@20 using MSCOCO |
---|---
CLIP | MI-400-GT | MI-256-GT | MI-400-INF | MI-256-INF | Fair-Samp | FPCA-GT | FPCA-INF |
0.9±0.04 | 0.9±0.04 | 0.87±0.04 | 0.87±0.04 | 0.86±0.04 | 0.91±0.04 | 0.9±0.04 | 0.9±0.04 |
Precision@50 using MSCOCO |
0.86±0.04 | 0.87±0.04 | 0.83±0.04 | 0.83±0.04 | 0.83±0.04 | 0.87±0.2 | 0.86±0.04 | 0.86±0.04 |
Precision@70 using MSCOCO |
0.85±0.04 | 0.85±0.04 | 0.81±0.06 | 0.81±0.04 | 0.82±0.04 | 0.85±0.04 | 0.85±0.04 | 0.84±0.04 |
Precision @20 using CELEBA |
0.88±0.06 | 0.82±0.1 | 0.67±0.18 | 0.71±0.12 | 0.71±0.14 | 0.67±0.16 | 0.84±0.08 | 0.87±0.06 |
Precision@50 using CelebA |
0.85±0.08 | 0.78±0.1 | 0.65±0.16 | 0.72±0.12 | 0.71±0.12 | 0.68±0.16 | 0.81±0.1 | 0.84±0.08 |
Precision@100 using Celeba |
0.82±0.08 | 0.76±0.1 | 0.65±0.14 | 0.73±0.12 | 0.69±0.1 | 0.67±0.18 | 0.78±0.1 | 0.81±0.08 |
Figure 15. [Retrieval - DDP - Subjective - MSCOCO ] The figure on the top
shows DDP, given by Eq. (2), for retrieval tasks using MSCOCO dataset. These
results demonstrate bias in human-centric subjective tasks. At the bottom, we
observe the fraction of query results that actually include a person.
Surprisingly, for many human-related queries, the retrieved images do not
feature any humans at all. Additionally, this demonstrates that the simple
baseline of gendered queries perform very well in reducing disparity. However,
the mutual information-based approaches, although effective in reducing
disparity in some cases, fail to retrieve images containing humans.
Interestingly, Fair PCA, trained on the inferred gender attribute, manages to
return appropriate images while still reducing some disparity. One possible
reason for this could be that the gender labels derived from the captions,
which serve as ground truth, are quite noisy. In contrast, training fair PCA
on on the inferred gender attribute directly from the CLIP model appears to
yield better results in this context. Figure 16. [Classification - DDP -
Subjective - MSCOCO ] The figure on the top shows DDP, given by Eq. (1), for
classification tasks using MSCOCO dataset. These results show bias for human-
centric subjective tasks. They demonstrate that for most methods reduce
disparity across gender in classification tasks.