Increasing Fairness in Classification of Out of Distribution Data for Facial Recognition

Standard classification theory assumes that the distribution of images in the test and training sets are identical. Unfortunately, real-life scenarios typically feature unseen data ("out-of-distribution data") which is different from data in the training distribution("in-distribution"). This issue is most prevalent in social justice problems where data from under-represented groups may appear in the test data without representing an equal proportion of the training data. This may result in a model returning confidently wrong decisions and predictions. We are interested in the following question: Can the performance of a neural network improve on facial images of out-of-distribution data when it is trained simultaneously on multiple datasets of in-distribution data? We approach this problem by incorporating the Outlier Exposure model and investigate how the model's performance changes when other datasets of facial images were implemented. We observe that the accuracy and other metrics of the model can be increased by applying Outlier Exposure, incorporating a trainable weight parameter to increase the machine's emphasis on outlier images, and by re-weighting the importance of different class labels. We also experimented with whether sorting the images and determining outliers via image features would have more of an effect on the metrics than sorting by average pixel value. Our goal was to make models not only more accurate but also more fair by scanning a more expanded range of images. We also tested the datasets in reverse order to see whether a more fair dataset with balanced features has an effect on the model's accuracy.