让人脸特征只保留身份信息,自动剥离性别种族等无关属性。
Variational Latent Entropy Estimation Disentanglement: Controlled Attribute Leakage for Face Recognition

- 用变分自编码器重构预训练特征,分离出关键属性
- 通过熵估计控制信息移除,实现隐私与识别精度平衡
- 在多个数据集上减少群体偏差,适合公平性要求高的场景
人脸识别特征包含身份信息,但也隐含性别、种族等其他因素。这些因素若被下游系统滥用,会影响隐私与公平性。本文提出一种后处理方法 VLEED,基于变分自编码器重构预训练嵌入,并通过潜空间中类别属性熵的估计,引导生成一个将目标类别变量与身份相关信息分离的简化表示。该方法采用基于互信息的目标函数,训练稳定,可精细控制信息删除程度。我们在 IJB-C、RFW 和 VGGFace2 数据集上评估了性别和种族的解耦效果,对比多种先进方法,衡量验证性能、解耦变量的可预测性(线性和非线性分类器)以及基于错误匹配率的群体差异指标。结果表明,VLEED 在隐私-效用权衡上优于现有方法,同时有效降低不同人口群体间的识别偏差。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Face recognition embeddings encode identity, but they also encode other factors such as gender and ethnicity. Depending on how these factors are used by a downstream system, separating them from the information needed for verification is important for both privacy and fairness. We propose Variational Latent Entropy Estimation Disentanglement (VLEED), a post-hoc method that transforms pretrained embeddings with a variational autoencoder and encourages a distilled representation where the categorical variable of interest is separated from identity-relevant information. VLEED uses a mutual information-based objective realised through the estimation of the entropy of the categorical attribute in the latent space, and provides stable training with fine-grained control over information removal. We evaluate our method on IJB-C, RFW, and VGGFace2 for gender and ethnicity disentanglement, and compare it to various state-of-the-art methods. We report verification utility, predictability of the disentangled variable under linear and nonlinear classifiers, and group disparity metrics based on false match rates. Our results show that VLEED offers a wide range of privacy-utility tradeoffs over existing methods and can also reduce recognition bias across demographic groups.
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