# Social bias and fairness in VLMs

Area: [Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/index.md). HTML: https://mlsanity.com/mllm/social-bias-and-fairness-in-vlms/

## Key facts

- Social bias and fairness in VLMs: 123 papers on arXiv since 2022 (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- 24 of its 123 mapped papers (20%) cite “DeAR: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Additive Residuals” (2023, arXiv 2303.10431).
- 24 of its 123 mapped papers (20%) cite “Examining Gender and Racial Bias in Large Vision-Language Models Using a Novel Dataset of Parallel Images” (2024, arXiv 2402.05779).
- 4 new papers 17 Sep–7 Oct.

## Most cited here

- [DeAR: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Additive Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10431/) (2023), cited by 24 papers here
- [Examining Gender and Racial Bias in Large Vision-Language Models Using a Novel Dataset of Parallel Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05779/) (2024), cited by 24 papers here
- [A Prompt Array Keeps the Bias Away: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11933/) (2022), cited by 23 papers here
- [SocialCounterfactuals: Probing and Mitigating Intersectional Social Biases in Vision-Language Models with Counterfactual Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00825/) (2023), cited by 22 papers here
- [Debiasing Vision-Language Models via Biased Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00070/) (2023), cited by 21 papers here
- [VisoGender: A dataset for benchmarking gender bias in image-text pronoun resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12424/) (2023), cited by 19 papers here
- [MultiModal Bias: Introducing a Framework for Stereotypical Bias Assessment beyond Gender and Race in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12734/) (2023), cited by 12 papers here
- [Identifying Implicit Social Biases in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00997/) (2024), cited by 12 papers here
- [GenderBias-VL: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Vision Language Models via Counterfactual Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00600/) (2024), cited by 10 papers here
- [Counterfactually Measuring and Eliminating Social Bias in Vision-Language Pre-training Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01056/) (2022), cited by 9 papers here

## New (17 Sep–7 Oct)

- [Similar Choices, Different Attention: Cross-Modal Associations in Humans and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36475/) (2026-09-29)
- [When Words Speak Louder than Images: Towards Understanding Language Bias in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35272/) (2026-09-28)
- [Gender Bias in Vision-Language In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27682/) (2026-09-23)
- [Feed the Panel Dimensions, Not Verdicts: Rubric-Decomposed Fusion of Vision-Language Aesthetic Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27110/) (2026-09-22)