White-box fairness testing through adversarial sampling

Abstract

Although deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated astonishing performance in many applications, there are still concerns on their dependability. One desirable property of DNN for applications with societal impact is fairness (i.e., non-discrimination). In this work, we propose a scalable approach for searching individual discriminatory instances of DNN. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach only employs lightweight procedures like gradient computation and clustering, which makes it significantly more scalable than existing methods. Experimental results show that our approach explores the search space more effectively (9 times) and generates much more individual discriminatory instances (25 times) using much less time (half to 1/7).