On the Fairness of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are one of the greatest advances in AI in recent years. With their ability to directly learn the probability distribution of data, and then sample synthetic realistic data. Many applications have emerged, using GANs to solve classical problems in machine learning, such as data augmentation, class unbalance problems, and fair representation learning. In this paper, we analyze and highlight fairness concerns of GANs model. In this regard, we show empirically that GANs models may inherently prefer certain groups during the training process and therefore they're not able to homogeneously generate data from different groups during the testing phase. Furthermore, we propose solutions to solve this issue by conditioning the GAN model towards samples' group or using ensemble method (boosting) to allow the GAN model to leverage distributed structure of data during the training phase and generate groups at equal rate during the testing phase.Comment: submitted to International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 202

Pose-Normalized Image Generation for Person Re-identification

Person Re-identification (re-id) faces two major challenges: the lack of cross-view paired training data and learning discriminative identity-sensitive and view-invariant features in the presence of large pose variations. In this work, we address both problems by proposing a novel deep person image generation model for synthesizing realistic person images conditional on the pose. The model is based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) designed specifically for pose normalization in re-id, thus termed pose-normalization GAN (PN-GAN). With the synthesized images, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free of the influence of pose variations. We show that this feature is strong on its own and complementary to features learned with the original images. Importantly, under the transfer learning setting, we show that our model generalizes well to any new re-id dataset without the need for collecting any training data for model fine-tuning. The model thus has the potential to make re-id model truly scalable.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure