Towards Generalised and Incremental Bias Mitigation in Personality Computing

Jian Jiang, Viswonathan Manoranjan, Hanan Salam, Oya Çeliktutan

Abstract: Building systems for predicting human socio-emotional states has promising applications; however, if trained on biased data, such systems could inadvertently yield biased decisions. Bias mitigation remains an open problem, which tackles the correction of a model's disparate performance over different groups defined by particular sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, age, and race). In this work, we design a novel fairness loss function named Multi-Group Parity (MGP) to provide a generalised approach for bias mitigation in personality computing. In contrast to existing works in the literature, MGP is generalised as it features four ‘multiple’ properties (4Mul): multiple tasks, multiple modalities, multiple sensitive attributes, and multi-valued attributes. Moreover, we explore how to incrementally mitigate the biases when more sensitive attributes are taken into consideration sequentially. Towards this problem, we introduce a novel algorithm that utilises an incremental learning framework to mitigate bias against one attribute data at a time without compromising past fairness. Extensive experiments on two large-scale multi-modal personality recognition datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving superior bias mitigation under the proposed four properties and incremental debiasing settings.