Facial analysis systems have been deployed by large companies and critiqued by scholars and activists for the past decade. Many existing algorithmic audits examine the performance of these systems on later stage elements of facial analysis systems like facial recognition and age, emotion, or perceived gender prediction; however, a core component to these systems has been vastly understudied from a fairness perspective: face detection, sometimes called face localization. Since face detection is a pre-requisite step in facial analysis systems, the bias we observe in face detection will flow downstream to the other components like facial recognition and emotion prediction. Additionally, no prior work has focused on the robustness of these systems under various perturbations and corruptions, which leaves open the question of how various people are impacted by these phenomena. We present the first of its kind detailed benchmark of face detection systems, specifically examining the robustness to noise of commercial and academic models. We use both standard and recently released academic facial datasets to quantitatively analyze trends in face detection robustness. Across all the datasets and systems, we generally find that photos of individuals who are masculine presenting, older, of darker skin type, or have dim lighting are more susceptible to errors than their counterparts in other identities.

Facial analysis systems have been deployed by large companies and critiqued by scholars and activists for the past decade. Many existing algorithmic audits examine the performance of these systems on later stage elements of facial analysis systems like facial recognition and age, emotion, or perceived gender prediction; however, a core component to these systems has been vastly understudied from a fairness perspective: face detection, sometimes called face localization. Since face detection is a pre-requisite step in facial analysis systems, the bias we observe in face detection will flow downstream to the other components like facial recognition and emotion prediction. Additionally, no prior work has focused on the robustness of these systems under various perturbations and corruptions, which leaves open the question of how various people are impacted by these phenomena. We present the first of its kind detailed benchmark of face detection systems, specifically examining the robustness to noise of commercial and academic models.

Abstract: While adversarial training is generally used as a defense mechanism, recent works show that it can also act as a regularizer. By co-training a neural network on clean and adversarial inputs, it is possible to improve classification accuracy on the clean, non-adversarial inputs. We demonstrate that, contrary to previous findings, it is not necessary to separate batch statistics when co-training on clean and adversarial inputs, and that it is sufficient to use adapters with few domain-specific parameters for each type of input. We establish that using the classification token of a Vision Transformer (ViT) as an adapter is enough to match the classification performance of dual normalization layers, while using significantly less additional parameters. First, we improve upon the top-1 accuracy of a non-adversarially trained ViT-B16 model by 1.12% on ImageNet (reaching 83.76% top-1 accuracy).

Adversarial training (AT) is proved to reliably improve network's robustness against adversarial data. However, current AT with a pre-specified perturbation budget has limitations in learning a robust network. Firstly, applying a pre-specified perturbation budget on networks of various model capacities will yield divergent degree of robustness disparity between natural and robust accuracies, which deviates from robust network's desideratum. Secondly, the attack strength of adversarial training data constrained by the pre-specified perturbation budget fails to upgrade as the growth of network robustness, which leads to robust overfitting and further degrades the adversarial robustness. To overcome these limitations, we propose \emph{Strength-Adaptive Adversarial Training} (SAAT). Specifically, the adversary employs an adversarial loss constraint to generate adversarial training data. Under this constraint, the perturbation budget will be adaptively adjusted according to the training state of adversarial data, which can effectively avoid robust overfitting. Besides, SAAT explicitly constrains the attack strength of training data through the adversarial loss, which manipulates model capacity scheduling during training, and thereby can flexibly control the degree of robustness disparity and adjust the tradeoff between natural accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments show that our proposal boosts the robustness of adversarial training.