Automated Face Recognition Systems (FRSs), developed using deep learning models, are deployed worldwide for identity verification and facial attribute analysis. The performance of these models is determined by a complex interdependence among the model architecture, optimization/loss function and datasets. Although FRSs have surpassed human-level accuracy, they continue to be disparate against certain demographics. Due to the ubiquity of applications, it is extremely important to understand the impact of the three components -- model architecture, loss function and face image dataset on the accuracy-disparity trade-off to design better, unbiased platforms. In this work, we perform an in-depth analysis of three FRSs for the task of gender prediction, with various architectural modifications resulting in ten deep-learning models coupled with four loss functions and benchmark them on seven face datasets across 266 evaluation configurations. Our results show that all three components have an individual as well as a combined impact on both accuracy and disparity. We identify that datasets have an inherent property that causes them to perform similarly across models, independent of the choice of loss functions. Moreover, the choice of dataset determines the model's perceived bias -- the same model reports bias in opposite directions for three gender-balanced datasets of ``in-the-wild'' face images of popular individuals. Studying the facial embeddings shows that the models are unable to generalize a uniform definition of what constitutes a ``female face'' as opposed to a ``male face'', due to dataset diversity. We provide recommendations to model developers on using our study as a blueprint for model development and subsequent deployment.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been examined and shown to exhibit biases toward particular groups of individuals, influenced by factors such as demographic traits, accents, and speech styles. Noise can disproportionately impact speakers with certain accents, dialects, or speaking styles, leading to biased error rates. In this work, we introduce a novel framework DENOASR, which is a selective denoising technique to reduce the disparity in the word error rates between the two gender groups, male and female. We find that a combination of two popular speech denoising techniques, viz. DEMUCS and LE, can be effectively used to mitigate ASR disparity without compromising their overall performance. Experiments using two state-of-the-art open-source ASRs - OpenAI WHISPER and NVIDIA NEMO - on multiple benchmark datasets, including TIE, VOX-POPULI, TEDLIUM, and FLEURS, show that there is a promising reduction in the average word error rate gap across the two gender groups. For a given dataset, the denoising is selectively applied on speech samples having speech intelligibility below a certain threshold, estimated using a small validation sample, thus ameliorating the need for large-scale human-written ground-truth transcripts. Our findings suggest that selective denoising can be an elegant approach to mitigate biases in present-day ASR systems.

AI based Face Recognition Systems (FRSs) are now widely distributed and deployed as MLaaS solutions all over the world, moreso since the COVID-19 pandemic for tasks ranging from validating individuals' faces while buying SIM cards to surveillance of citizens. Extensive biases have been reported against marginalized groups in these systems and have led to highly discriminatory outcomes. The post-pandemic world has normalized wearing face masks but FRSs have not kept up with the changing times. As a result, these systems are susceptible to mask based face occlusion. In this study, we audit four commercial and nine open-source FRSs for the task of face re-identification between different varieties of masked and unmasked images across five benchmark datasets (total 14,722 images). These simulate a realistic validation/surveillance task as deployed in all major countries around the world. Three of the commercial and five of the open-source FRSs are highly inaccurate; they further perpetuate biases against non-White individuals, with the lowest accuracy being 0%. A survey for the same task with 85 human participants also results in a low accuracy of 40%. Thus a human-in-the-loop moderation in the pipeline does not alleviate the concerns, as has been frequently hypothesized in literature. Our large-scale study shows that developers, lawmakers and users of such services need to rethink the design principles behind FRSs, especially for the task of face re-identification, taking cognizance of observed biases.

AI models have become extremely popular and accessible to the general public. However, they are continuously under the scanner due to their demonstrable biases toward various sections of the society like people of color and non-binary people. In this study, we audit three existing gender analyzers -- uClassify, Readable and HackerFactor, for biases against non-binary individuals. These tools are designed to predict only the cisgender binary labels, which leads to discrimination against non-binary members of the society. We curate two datasets -- Reddit comments (660k) and, Tumblr posts (2.05M) and our experimental evaluation shows that the tools are highly inaccurate with the overall accuracy being ~50% on all platforms. Predictions for non-binary comments on all platforms are mostly female, thus propagating the societal bias that non-binary individuals are effeminate. To address this, we fine-tune a BERT multi-label classifier on the two datasets in multiple combinations, observe an overall performance of ~77% on the most realistically deployable setting and a surprisingly higher performance of 90% for the non-binary class. We also audit ChatGPT using zero-shot prompts on a small dataset (due to high pricing) and observe an average accuracy of 58% for Reddit and Tumblr combined (with overall better results for Reddit). Thus, we show that existing systems, including highly advanced ones like ChatGPT are biased, and need better audits and moderation and, that such societal biases can be addressed and alleviated through simple off-the-shelf models like BERT trained on more gender inclusive datasets.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are designed to transcribe spoken language into written text and find utility in a variety of applications including voice assistants and transcription services. However, it has been observed that state-of-the-art ASR systems which deliver impressive benchmark results, struggle with speakers of certain regions or demographics due to variation in their speech properties. In this work, we describe the curation of a massive speech dataset of 8740 hours consisting of $\sim9.8$K technical lectures in the English language along with their transcripts delivered by instructors representing various parts of Indian demography. The dataset is sourced from the very popular NPTEL MOOC platform. We use the curated dataset to measure the existing disparity in YouTube Automatic Captions and OpenAI Whisper model performance across the diverse demographic traits of speakers in India. While there exists disparity due to gender, native region, age and speech rate of speakers, disparity based on caste is non-existent. We also observe statistically significant disparity across the disciplines of the lectures. These results indicate the need of more inclusive and robust ASR systems and more representational datasets for disparity evaluation in them.