Haochen Li will present his MSE Talk "Emergence of race and gender in face recognition systems" on Thursday May 7th, 2020 at 2pm.   The talk will take place via Zoom: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/96991086598

The members of his committee are Arvind Narayanan (adviser) and Olga Russakovsky (reader).

Abstract:

Can computer vision recover attributes such as gender and race(or some approximation thereof) from facial images without being trained for such classification? We show that face recognition systems accurately reproduce human categorizations of race and gender in photos of faces, despite receiving no training labels for such classification. We show race and gender categorization both in FaceNet, a state-of-the-art vector embedding, and Microsoft’s Bing Face API, a deployed black-box system. Given that deployed AI systems today use facial expressions to make decisions about people, our work shows that withholding sensitive attributes from the model does not ensure that the models have no access to them.