arXiv subjects

Seyyed Mohammad Sadegh Moosavi Khorzooghi

Publications and source records attributed to Seyyed Mohammad Sadegh Moosavi Khorzooghi.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

FairDeFace: Evaluating the Fairness and Adversarial Robustness of Face Obfuscation Methods

The lack of a common platform and benchmark datasets for evaluating face obfuscation methods has been a challenge, with every method being tested using arbitrary experiments, datasets, and metrics. While prior work has demonstrated that face recognition systems exhibit bias against some demographic groups, there exists a substantial gap in our understanding regarding the fairness of face obfuscation methods. Providing fair face obfuscation methods can ensure equitable protection across diverse demographic groups, especially since they can be used to preserve the privacy of vulnerable populations. To address these gaps, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework, named FairDeFace, designed to assess the adversarial robustness and fairness of face obfuscation methods. The framework introduces a set of modules encompassing data benchmarks, face detection and recognition algorithms, adversarial models, utility detection models, and fairness metrics. FairDeFace serves as a versatile platform where any face obfuscation method can be integrated, allowing for rigorous testing and comparison with other state-of-the-art methods. In its current implementation, FairDeFace incorporates 6 attacks, and several privacy, utility and fairness metrics. Using FairDeFace, and by conducting more than 500 experiments, we evaluated and compared the adversarial robustness of seven face obfuscation methods. This extensive analysis led to many interesting findings both in terms of the degree of robustness of existing methods and their biases against some gender or racial groups. FairDeFace also uses visualization of focused areas for both obfuscation and verification attacks to show not only which areas are mostly changed in the obfuscation process for some demographics, but also why they failed through focus area comparison of obfuscation and verification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Auditing Yelp's Business Ranking and Review Recommendation Through the Lens of Fairness

Auditing is critical to ensuring the fairness and reliability of decision-making systems. However, auditing a black-box system for bias can be challenging due to the lack of transparency in the model's internal workings. In many web applications, such as Yelp, it is challenging, if not impossible, to manipulate their inputs systematically to identify bias in the output. Yelp connects users and businesses, where users identify new businesses and simultaneously express their experiences through reviews. Yelp recommendation software moderates user-provided content by categorizing it into recommended and not-recommended sections. The recommended reviews, among other attributes, are used by Yelp's ranking algorithm to rank businesses in a neighborhood. Due to Yelp's substantial popularity and its high impact on local businesses' success, understanding the bias of its algorithms is crucial. This data-driven study, for the first time, investigates the bias of Yelp's business ranking and review recommendation system. We examine three hypotheses to assess if Yelp's recommendation software shows bias against reviews of less established users with fewer friends and reviews and if Yelp's business ranking algorithm shows bias against restaurants located in specific neighborhoods, particularly in hotspot regions, with specific demographic compositions. Our findings show that reviews of less-established users are disproportionately categorized as not-recommended. We also find a positive association between restaurants' location in hotspot regions and their average exposure. Furthermore, we observed some cases of severe disparity bias in cities where the hotspots are in neighborhoods with less demographic diversity or higher affluence and education levels.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

StyleGAN as a Utility-Preserving Face De-identification Method

Face de-identification methods have been proposed to preserve users' privacy by obscuring their faces. These methods, however, can degrade the quality of photos, and they usually do not preserve the utility of faces, i.e., their age, gender, pose, and facial expression. Recently, GANs, such as StyleGAN, have been proposed, which generate realistic, high-quality imaginary faces. In this paper, we investigate the use of StyleGAN in generating de-identified faces through style mixing. We examined this de-identification method for preserving utility and privacy by implementing several face detection, verification, and identification attacks and conducting a user study. The results from our extensive experiments, human evaluation, and comparison with two state-of-the-art methods, i.e., CIAGAN and DeepPrivacy, show that StyleGAN performs on par or better than these methods, preserving users' privacy and images' utility. In particular, the results of the machine learning-based experiments show that StyleGAN0-4 preserves utility better than CIAGAN and DeepPrivacy while preserving privacy at the same level. StyleGAN0-3 preserves utility at the same level while providing more privacy. In this paper, for the first time, we also performed a carefully designed user study to examine both privacy and utility-preserving properties of StyleGAN0-3, 0-4, and 0-5, as well as CIAGAN and DeepPrivacy from the human observers' perspectives. Our statistical tests showed that participants tend to verify and identify StyleGAN0-5 images more easily than DeepPrivacy images. All the methods but StyleGAN0-5 had significantly lower identification rates than CIAGAN. Regarding utility, as expected, StyleGAN0-5 performed significantly better in preserving some attributes. Among all methods, on average, participants believe gender has been preserved the most while naturalness has been preserved the least.

cs.CV↗