FACET: Fairness in Computer Vision Evaluation Benchmark
Authors: name: Laura Gustafson; name: Chloe Rolland; name: Nikhila Ravi; name: Quentin Duval; name: Aaron Adcock; name: Cheng-Yang Fu; name: Melissa Hall; name: Candace Ross
Published: 2023-08-31 17:59:48

Abstract: Computer vision models have known performance disparities across attributes
such as gender and skin tone. This means during tasks such as classification
and detection, model performance differs for certain classes based on the
demographics of the people in the image. These disparities have been shown to
exist, but until now there has not been a unified approach to measure these
differences for common use-cases of computer vision models. We present a new
benchmark named FACET (FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), a large,
publicly available evaluation set of 32k images for some of the most common
vision tasks - image classification, object detection and segmentation. For
every image in FACET, we hired expert reviewers to manually annotate
person-related attributes such as perceived skin tone and hair type, manually
draw bounding boxes and label fine-grained person-related classes such as disk
jockey or guitarist. In addition, we use FACET to benchmark state-of-the-art
vision models and present a deeper understanding of potential performance
disparities and challenges across sensitive demographic attributes. With the
exhaustive annotations collected, we probe models using single demographics
attributes as well as multiple attributes using an intersectional approach
(e.g. hair color and perceived skin tone). Our results show that
classification, detection, segmentation, and visual grounding models exhibit
performance disparities across demographic attributes and intersections of
attributes. These harms suggest that not all people represented in datasets
receive fair and equitable treatment in these vision tasks. We hope current and
future results using our benchmark will contribute to fairer, more robust
vision models. FACET is available publicly at https://facet.metademolab.com/