Tiny, always-on and fragile: Bias propagation through design choices in on-device machine learning workflows

Billions of distributed, heterogeneous and resource constrained smart consumer devices deploy on-device machine learning (ML) to deliver private, fast and offline inference on personal data. On-device ML systems are highly context dependent, and sensitive to user, usage, hardware and environmental attributes. Despite this sensitivity and the propensity towards bias in ML, bias in on-device ML has not been studied. This paper studies the propagation of bias through design choices in on-device ML development workflows. We position \emph{reliablity bias}, which arises from disparate device failures across demographic groups, as a source of unfairness in on-device ML settings and quantify metrics to evaluate it. We then identify complex and interacting technical design choices in the on-device ML workflow that can lead to disparate performance across user groups, and thus \emph{reliability bias}. Finally, we show with an empirical case study that seemingly innocuous design choices such as the data sample rate, pre-processing parameters used to construct input features and pruning hyperparameters propagate \emph{reliability bias} through an audio keyword spotting development workflow. We leverage our insights to suggest strategies for developers to develop fairer on-device ML.