不使用儿童数据训练,实现更伦理的面部年龄估计。
Toward a More Ethical Facial Age Estimation: A Generalized Zero-Shot Benchmark Without Training on Children's Data

- 将无儿童数据训练设为广义零样本学习问题,严格划分年龄段。
- 模型在未见年龄组上平均准确率下降46.4%,最高达52.8%。
- 所有模型都倾向将未知年龄预测为邻近已见年龄,存在系统性偏差。
从人脸图像中进行年龄估计通常依赖包含未成年人图像的训练数据,这引发伦理、法律和隐私问题,且儿童数据治理框架明确反对。尽管该任务仍具价值(如检测儿童性虐待图像),我们主张完全避免使用儿童数据,并量化其对准确率的影响。我们将无儿童数据训练的年龄估计形式化为广义零样本学习(GZSL)问题:训练中出现的年龄区间为已见类,未包含的为未见类,模型需在两类上联合评估。相较于仅评估未见类的传统零样本方法,广义设置更符合实际部署需求——模型需覆盖全生命周期。针对六个常用数据集,我们引入标准化划分方案,严格分离年龄组;对含身份标注的数据集,采用主体-年龄专属划分以防止身份泄露。在该协议下评估九种主流年龄估计方法,结果表明所有模型在未见年龄组上均严重退化,平均下降46.4%,最高达52.8%。此外,模型并非随机失效,而是系统性地将未见年龄预测锚定于邻近已见类别,体现广义零样本学习中的典型‘已见类偏见’。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Age estimation from facial images typically relies on training data that includes images of minors, a practice that raises ethical, legal, and privacy concerns and that child-data governance frameworks explicitly advise against. While the task remains relevant (e.g., for detecting child sexual abuse imagery), we advocate against using data from minors entirely and quantify what the exclusion costs in accuracy. We formalize age estimation without children's training data as a generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) problem: age intervals present during training are seen classes and withheld intervals are unseen, with models evaluated jointly on both. The generalized setting, rather than conventional zero-shot evaluation on unseen classes alone, is the appropriate one here because a deployed estimator must operate across the entire lifespan, not only on the interval withheld from it. Revisiting six widely used datasets, we introduce standardized splits with strict age-group separation. For datasets with identity annotations, subject-age-exclusive splits prevent identity leakage across the seen/unseen boundary. Evaluating nine state-of-the-art age estimation methods under this protocol reveals that all of them fail to generalize to unseen age groups, suffering substantial degradation --- on average 46.4%, and up to 52.8% --- relative to the supervised baseline. Moreover, models do not simply degrade: they systematically anchor predictions for unseen ages to nearby seen classes, a manifestation of the well-known seen-class bias in generalized zero-shot learning.
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