Fairness and Bias Mitigation in Computer Vision: A Survey

Computer vision systems have witnessed rapid progress over the past two decades due to multiple advances in the field. As these systems are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes real-world applications, there is a dire need to ensure that they do not propagate or amplify any discriminatory tendencies in historical or human-curated data or inadvertently learn biases from spurious correlations. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on fairness that summarizes and sheds light on ongoing trends and successes in the context of computer vision. The topics we discuss include 1) The origin and technical definitions of fairness drawn from the wider fair machine learning literature and adjacent disciplines. 2) Work that sought to discover and analyze biases in computer vision systems. 3) A summary of methods proposed to mitigate bias in computer vision systems in recent years. 4) A comprehensive summary of resources and datasets produced by researchers to measure, analyze, and mitigate bias and enhance fairness. 5) Discussion of the field's success, continuing trends in the context of multimodal foundation and generative models, and gaps that still need to be addressed. The presented characterization should help researchers understand the importance of identifying and mitigating bias in computer vision and the state of the field and identify potential directions for future research.

Learning from Models and Data for Visual Grounding

We introduce SynGround, a novel framework that combines data-driven learning and knowledge transfer from various large-scale pretrained models to enhance the visual grounding capabilities of a pretrained vision-and-language model. The knowledge transfer from the models initiates the generation of image descriptions through an image description generator. These descriptions serve dual purposes: they act as prompts for synthesizing images through a text-to-image generator, and as queries for synthesizing text, from which phrases are extracted using a large language model. Finally, we leverage an open-vocabulary object detector to generate synthetic bounding boxes for the synthetic images and texts. We finetune a pretrained vision-and-language model on this dataset by optimizing a mask-attention consistency objective that aligns region annotations with gradient-based model explanations. The resulting model improves the grounding capabilities of an off-the-shelf vision-and-language model. Particularly, SynGround improves the pointing game accuracy of ALBEF on the Flickr30k dataset from 79.38% to 87.26%, and on RefCOCO+ Test A from 69.35% to 79.06% and on RefCOCO+ Test B from 53.77% to 63.67%.

Improved Visual Grounding through Self-Consistent Explanations

Vision-and-language models trained to match images with text can be combined with visual explanation methods to point to the locations of specific objects in an image. Our work shows that the localization --"grounding"-- abilities of these models can be further improved by finetuning for self-consistent visual explanations. We propose a strategy for augmenting existing text-image datasets with paraphrases using a large language model, and SelfEQ, a weakly-supervised strategy on visual explanation maps for paraphrases that encourages self-consistency. Specifically, for an input textual phrase, we attempt to generate a paraphrase and finetune the model so that the phrase and paraphrase map to the same region in the image. We posit that this both expands the vocabulary that the model is able to handle, and improves the quality of the object locations highlighted by gradient-based visual explanation methods (e.g. GradCAM). We demonstrate that SelfEQ improves performance on Flickr30k, ReferIt, and RefCOCO+ over a strong baseline method and several prior works. Particularly, comparing to other methods that do not use any type of box annotations, we obtain 84.07% on Flickr30k (an absolute improvement of 4.69%), 67.40% on ReferIt (an absolute improvement of 7.68%), and 75.10%, 55.49% on RefCOCO+ test sets A and B respectively (an absolute improvement of 3.74% on average).

Efficient Mirror Detection via Multi-level Heterogeneous Learning

We present HetNet (Multi-level \textbf{Het}erogeneous \textbf{Net}work), a highly efficient mirror detection network. Current mirror detection methods focus more on performance than efficiency, limiting the real-time applications (such as drones). Their lack of efficiency is aroused by the common design of adopting homogeneous modules at different levels, which ignores the difference between different levels of features. In contrast, HetNet detects potential mirror regions initially through low-level understandings (\textit{e.g.}, intensity contrasts) and then combines with high-level understandings (contextual discontinuity for instance) to finalize the predictions. To perform accurate yet efficient mirror detection, HetNet follows an effective architecture that obtains specific information at different stages to detect mirrors. We further propose a multi-orientation intensity-based contrasted module (MIC) and a reflection semantic logical module (RSL), equipped on HetNet, to predict potential mirror regions by low-level understandings and analyze semantic logic in scenarios by high-level understandings, respectively. Compared to the state-of-the-art method, HetNet runs 664$\%$ faster and draws an average performance gain of 8.9$\%$ on MAE, 3.1$\%$ on IoU, and 2.0$\%$ on F-measure on two mirror detection benchmarks.

Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection with Scribble Annotations

Existing camouflaged object detection (COD) methods rely heavily on large-scale datasets with pixel-wise annotations. However, due to the ambiguous boundary, it is very time-consuming and labor-intensive to annotate camouflage objects pixel-wisely (which takes ~ 60 minutes per image). In this paper, we propose the first weakly-supervised camouflaged object detection (COD) method, using scribble annotations as supervision. To achieve this, we first construct a scribble-based camouflaged object dataset with 4,040 images and corresponding scribble annotations. It is worth noting that annotating the scribbles used in our dataset takes only ~ 10 seconds per image, which is 360 times faster than per-pixel annotations. However, the network directly using scribble annotations for supervision will fail to localize the boundary of camouflaged objects and tend to have inconsistent predictions since scribble annotations only describe the primary structure of objects without details. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel consistency loss composed of two parts: a reliable cross-view loss to attain reliable consistency over different images, and a soft inside-view loss to maintain consistency inside a single prediction map. Besides, we observe that humans use semantic information to segment regions near boundaries of camouflaged objects. Therefore, we design a feature-guided loss, which includes visual features directly extracted from images and semantically significant features captured by models. Moreover, we propose a novel network that detects camouflaged objects by scribble learning on structural information and semantic relations. Experimental results show that our model outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods on three COD benchmarks with an average improvement of 11.0% on MAE, 3.2% on S-measure, 2.5% on E-measure and 4.4% on weighted F-measure.