Fair Active Learning (FAL) utilized active learning techniques to achieve
high model performance with limited data and to reach fairness between
sensitive groups (e.g., genders). However, the impact of the adversarial
attack, which is vital for various safety-critical machine learning
applications, is not yet addressed in FAL. Observing this, we introduce a novel
task, Fair Robust Active Learning (FRAL), integrating conventional FAL and
adversarial robustness. FRAL requires ML models to leverage active learning
techniques to jointly achieve equalized performance on benign data and
equalized robustness against adversarial attacks between groups. In this new
task, previous FAL methods generally face the problem of unbearable
computational burden and ineffectiveness. Therefore, we develop a simple yet
effective FRAL strategy by Joint INconsistency (JIN). To efficiently find
samples that can boost the performance and robustness of disadvantaged groups
for labeling, our method exploits the prediction inconsistency between benign
and adversarial samples as well as between standard and robust models.
Extensive experiments under diverse datasets and sensitive groups demonstrate
that our method not only achieves fairer performance on benign samples but also
obtains fairer robustness under white-box PGD attacks compared with existing
active learning and FAL baselines. We are optimistic that FRAL would pave a new
path for developing safe and robust ML research and applications such as facial
attribute recognition in biometrics systems.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure