Transparency: a Step Towards Fairness

Pulse, a recent machine learning image reconstruction algorithm, sparked a lot of controversy. The purpose of the model was to reconstruct blurry, low resolution images. Unfortunately, when a low resolution image of President Obama was provided as input to the model, the result was the following:  Some machine learning experts attributed the model’s racial bias to the unevenness in the training data. They argued that FlickFaceHQ, the dataset on which the model was pretrained, contained mostly images of white faces. Because of that, the model learned to reconstruct white faces most of the time. Their argument has some merit. Indeed,…...