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Effective Bias Detection and Mitigation: Key Findings from BiasPainter’s Evaluation

by Tech Media Bias [Research Publication]August 7th, 2024

Too Long; Didn't Read

BiasPainter is a new framework for evaluating social biases in image generation models by comparing edited seed images with generated outputs. It outperforms existing methods by integrating both images and text prompts, showing high accuracy in detecting and mitigating bias. The framework is validated through experiments on commercial and research models, with all resources available for further research.

featured image - Effective Bias Detection and Mitigation: Key Findings from BiasPainter’s Evaluation

‘a collection of ai generated headshots’ Image created by HackerNoon AI Image Generator

Authors:

(1) Wenxuan Wang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;

(2) Haonan Bai, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

(3) Jen-tse Huang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;

(4) Yuxuan Wan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;

(5) Youliang Yuan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Shenzhen, China

(6) Haoyi Qiu University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA;

(7) Nanyun Peng, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

(8) Michael Lyu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.

Table of Links

Abstract

1 Introduction

2 Background

3 Approach and Implementation

3.1 Seed Image Collection and 3.2 Neutral Prompt List Collection

3.3 Image Generation and 3.4 Properties Assessment

3.5 Bias Evaluation

4 Evaluation

4.1 Experimental Setup

4.2 RQ1: Effectiveness of BiasPainter

4.3 RQ2 - Validity of Identified Biases

4.4 RQ3 - Bias Mitigation

5 Threats to Validity

7 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we design and implement BiasPainter, a metamorphic testing framework for measuring the social biases in image generation models. Unlike existing frameworks, which only use sentence descriptions as input and evaluate the properties of the generated images, BiasPainter adopts an image editing manner that inputs both seed images and sentence descriptions to let image generation models edit the seed image and then compare the generated image and seed image to measure the bias. We conduct experiments on five widely deployed commercial software and famous research models to verify the effectiveness of BiasPainter. and demonstrate that BiasPainter can effectively trigger a massive amount of biased behavior with high accuracy. In addition, we demonstrate that BiasPainter can help mitigate the bias in image generation models.

DATA AVAILABILITY

All the code, data, and results have been uploaded[17] and will be released for reproduction and future research.

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