[HSO]

> Similarly, I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black

Hair color, yes, but facial feature variability? I think your perception of more variability in European faces than Chinese ones says more about where/how you grew up than about the actual variability. To someone who grew up in an Asian monoculture, without exposure to media with European faces, all Europeans would look alike too.

[aangjie]

Err... I'm not so sure about this. I understand that as you grow up in one community, your brain networks/neurons specialize for distinguishing differences in facial features in that community more than in others. While I haven't seen enough chinese to argue, they have lesser facial feature variations, I can imagine how the algorithm defines facial features would be biased more towards the caucasian/European faces. So from the POV of the "facial feature detection" algorithm, European faces will have more variation in facial features than Chinese faces.

Context: I grew up in southern india and spent most of my early years there, but travelled out to the northern India in the mid twenties. I can now say, I can see facial feature variations in the NE India folks(these folks have facial similarity with chinese) I see around now (I currently live in the south)

[GTP]

>To someone who grew up in an Asian monoculture, without exposure to media with European faces, all Europeans would look alike too.

I'm instead sure about this because of a funny incident that happened to my mother just a few years ago. She was standing near a pizzeria when a chinese waitress stepped out and said (translating from italian, sorry if I make some mistakes):

waitress: "Take away?" my mother: "What?" waitress: "Take away?" my mother:"No, I haven't ordered anything" waitress: "You Italians! You look all alike!"

EDIT: formatting

[randyrand]

I imagine it's both.

[Nydhal]

It's funny how racial bias always comes out in discussion about NN. It all depends on the training data and that's all there is to it. Yet somehow, some people tend to blame the models or the programmers for not correcting this "bias" that is not "supposed" to be there.

[wonnage]

If the output of your fancy new NN classifies black people as gorillas it's absolutely the programmers' fault. It is useless for a large swathe of humanity, it creates a PR nightmare, etc.

So nah, it's not funny.

[jclos]

It depends on how you define "programmers' fault". In this case it would more a case of needing more training data to correct the mistake, which may or may not be the programmer's fault.

[Manishearth]

Of course it can be the programmer's fault. Programming NNs is not just about picking an unbiased sample set of data, you need to help the NN know what it's looking for.

As I've explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12759089, different races have different sets of facial features which are used for facial recognition (because they vary more). Now, when programming the NN, what if you only told it to look for the set of facial features you thought was important? It's very easy to let unconscious biases seep into your code.

[gotchange]

> different races have different sets of facial features which are used for facial recognition

I thought that «race» is a social construct not a scientific one and thus can't be relied on as a deciding factor in a scientific experiment or endeavor like face detection.

[rmc]

Humans perceive and classify race. No-one's disagreeing on that. "Race is a social construct" means that it isn't based 100% on biology or genetics.

Traffic laws are also social constructs. Yet we can build machines to follow them.

[eeZah7Ux]

> Humans perceive and classify race

No. Some cultures on Earth define "race" with various, conflicting standards. Some don't even have that concept.

[cmrdporcupine]

Actually, no, _some_ humans in certain places / cultures currently perceive and classify race.

The Roman empire spanned swathes of North Africa and had major centres there and traded with subsaharan Africa. And traded with the 'orient' all the way to China.

Their writings don't make racial classifications. They don't even remark much on skin colour or other features.

Visual features were known, but not considered that significant. And later in the empire people from all over the world became Romans via citizenship and what we now call "race" never factored into it.

[gotchange]

Yeah, Humans perceive and classify race (accurately or inaccurately) and that's why it can't be a reliable indicator or cornerstone for any reliable scientific system esp. when taking into account the "fluid" or "conflicting" nature of some of the prevailing definitions of races out there.

[Manishearth]

I'm using the term broadly. Google Scholar search "cross race facial recognition" if you want scientific references on this. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect#References

[gotchange]

That's the first sentence of the Wiki article:

"The cross-race effect (sometimes called cross-race bias, other-race bias or own-race bias) refers to the tendency to more easily recognize members of one's own race."

This premise is not well grounded in facts as evidence can show that some people esp. racially unaware, uneducated or desensitized don't fall into this category. To support their claim, they cite a US-only study which can't be sufficient to extrapolate for all humanity as a universal fact since we all know that US society is divided along racial line and it's deeply ingrained into people's minds from childhood.

It's like their caste system and with a highly cultural not scientific element to it.

Color me skeptic about this theory.

[radarsat1]

"It all depends on the training data"

Exactly.