A Solution to Co-occurence Bias: Attributes Disentanglement via Mutual Information Minimization for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

A Solution to Co-occurence Bias: Attributes Disentanglement via Mutual Information Minimization for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Yibo Zhou, Hai-Miao Hu, Jinzuo Yu, Zhenbo Xu, Weiqing Lu, Yuran Cao

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1831-1839. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/203

Recent studies on pedestrian attribute recognition progress with either explicit or implicit modeling of the co-occurence among attributes. Considering that this known a prior is highly variable and unforeseeable regarding the specific scenarios, we show that current methods can actually suffer in generalizing such fitted attributes interdependencies onto scenes or identities off the dataset distribution, resulting in the underlined bias of attributes co-occurence. To render models robust in realistic scenes, we propose the attributes-disentangled feature learning to ensure the recognition of an attribute not inferring on the existence of others, and which is sequentially formulated as a problem of mutual information minimization. Rooting from it, practical strategies are devised to efficiently decouple attributes, which substantially improve the baseline and establish state-of-the-art performance on realistic datasets like PETAzs and RAPzs.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Recognition (object detection, categorization)
Computer Vision: CV: Bias, fairness and privacy