Learning Dynamic Prototypes for Visual Pattern Debiasing

Abstract

Deep learning has achieved great success in academic benchmarks but fails to work effectively in the real world due to the potential dataset bias. The current learning methods are prone to inheriting or even amplifying the bias present in a training dataset and under-represent specific demographic groups. More recently, some dataset debiasing methods have been developed to address the above challenges based on the awareness of protected or sensitive attribute labels. However, the number of protected or sensitive attributes may be considerably large, making it laborious and costly to acquire sufficient manual annotation. To this end, we propose a prototype-based network to dynamically balance the learning of different subgroups for a given dataset. First, an object pattern embedding mechanism is presented to make the network focus on the foreground region. Then we design a prototype learning method to discover and extract the visual patterns from the training data in an unsupervised way. The number of prototypes is dynamic depending on the pattern structure of the feature space. We evaluate the proposed prototype-based network on three widely used polyp segmentation datasets with abundant qualitative and quantitative experiments. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the CNN-based and transformer-based state-of-the-art methods in terms of both effectiveness and fairness metrics. Moreover, extensive ablation studies are conducted to show the effectiveness of each proposed component and various parameter values. Lastly, we analyze how the number of prototypes grows during the training process and visualize the associated subgroups for each learned prototype. The code and data will be released at https://github.com/zijinY/dynamic-prototype-debiasing.