Google AI Blog

Intervening on early readouts for mitigating spurious features and simplicity bias

Posted by Rishabh Tiwari, Pre-doctoral Researcher, and Pradeep Shenoy, Research Scientist, Google Research Machine learning models in the real world are often trained on limited data that may contain unintended statistical biases . For example, in the CELEBA celebrity image dataset, a disproportionate number of female celebrities have blond hair, leading to classifiers incorrectly predicting “blond” as the hair color for most female faces — here, gender is a spurious feature for predicting hair color.

Google AI Blog
Mar 13, 2024

Health-specific embedding tools for dermatology and pathology

Posted by Dave Steiner, Clinical Research Scientist, Google Health, and Rory Pilgrim, Product Manager, Google Research There’s a worldwide shortage of access to medical imaging expert interpretation across specialties including radiology , dermatology and pathology . Machine learning (ML) technology can help ease this burden by powering tools that enable doctors to interpret these images more accurately and efficiently.

By Google AI
Google AI Blog
Mar 19, 2024

SCIN: A new resource for representative dermatology images

Posted by Pooja Rao, Research Scientist, Google Research Health datasets play a crucial role in research and medical education, but it can be challenging to create a dataset that represents the real world. For example, dermatology conditions are diverse in their appearance and severity and manifest differently across skin tones.

By Google AI
Google AI Blog
Feb 14, 2024

Learning the importance of training data under concept drift

Posted by Nishant Jain, Pre-doctoral Researcher, and Pradeep Shenoy, Research Scientist, Google Research The constantly changing nature of the world around us poses a significant challenge for the development of AI models. Often, models are trained on longitudinal data with the hope that the training data used will accurately represent inputs the model may receive in the future.

By Google AI
Google AI Blog
Mar 6, 2024

Croissant: a metadata format for ML-ready datasets

Posted by Omar Benjelloun, Software Engineer, Google Research, and Peter Mattson, Software Engineer, Google Core ML and President, MLCommons Association Machine learning (ML) practitioners looking to reuse existing datasets to train an ML model often spend a lot of time understanding the data, making sense of its organization, or figuring out what subset to use as features. So much time, in fact, that progress in the field of ML is hampered by a fundamental obstacle: the wide variety of data representations.

By Google AI
Google AI Blog
Mar 15, 2024

HEAL: A framework for health equity assessment of machine learning performance

Posted by Mike Schaekermann, Research Scientist, Google Research, and Ivor Horn, Chief Health Equity Officer & Director, Google Core Health equity is a major societal concern worldwide with disparities having many causes. These sources include limitations in access to healthcare, differences in clinical treatment, and even fundamental differences in the diagnostic technology.

By Google AI
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Controlling for Omitted Variable Bias in Deep Neural Networks

The paper introduces a control‑variable framework for deep neural networks to mitigate omitted variable bias, particularly shortcut learning where covariates like demographics influence predictions. It refits the final layer of a pre‑trained network using cross‑fitting with ridge penalisation, orthogonalises covariate effects, and marginalises predictions over covariate distributions to achieve unbiased, interpretable results. Experiments on simulated images and neuroimaging data show consistent estimation of true effects and performance close to models trained on unconfounded data.

By Manuel Pfeuffer, Roshan Prakash Rane, Kerstin Ritter, Sonja Greven
arXiv AI
Sep 16

When majority rules, minority loses: bias amplification of gradient descent

The paper presents a formal framework for majority‑minority learning tasks, demonstrating that standard gradient‑descent training can amplify bias by favoring majority groups and producing stereotypical predictors that ignore minority‑specific features. It identifies three key theoretical findings: the close proximity between full‑data and stereotypical predictors, the dominance of a region where training the entire model mainly captures majority traits, and a lower bound on the extra training needed to mitigate this effect. Experiments on deep learning for tabular and image classification illustrate these results.

By Fran\c{c}ois Bachoc (LPP), J\'er\^ome Bolte (TSE-R), Ryan Boustany (TSE-R), Jean-Michel Loubes (IMT, REGALIA)