# Gender and Racial Bias in Visual Question Answering Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Bottom-Up and Top-Down Attention for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07998/) (2017)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [OK-VQA: A Visual Question Answering Benchmark Requiring External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00067/) (2019)
- [VizWiz Grand Challenge: Answering Visual Questions from Blind People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08218/) (2018)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Visual7W: Grounded Question Answering in Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03416/) (2015)
- [Bilinear Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07932/) (2018)
- [Don't Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03683/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04315/) (2020)
- [Image Captioning with Semantic Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03925/) (2016)
- [Women also Snowboard: Overcoming Bias in Captioning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09797/) (2018)
- [YFCC100M: The New Data in Multimedia Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01817/) (2015)
- [Seeing Out of tHe bOx: End-to-End Pre-training for Vision-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03135/) (2021)
- [RUBi: Reducing Unimodal Biases in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10169/) (2019)
- [In Defense of Grid Features for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03615/) (2020)
- [No Classification without Representation: Assessing Geodiversity Issues in Open Data Sets for the Developing World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08536/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06576/) (2020)
- [MUTAN: Multimodal Tucker Fusion for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06676/) (2017)
- [Towards a Critical Race Methodology in Algorithmic Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03593/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [REVIVE: Regional Visual Representation Matters in Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01201/) (2022)
- [Examining Gender and Racial Bias in Large Vision-Language Models Using a Novel Dataset of Parallel Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05779/) (2024)
- [Visual Haystacks: A Vision-Centric Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13766/) (2024)
- [Uncurated Image-Text Datasets: Shedding Light on Demographic Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02828/) (2023)
- [TIBET: Identifying and Evaluating Biases in Text-to-Image Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01261/) (2023)
- [Generate, but Verify: Reducing Hallucination in Vision-Language Models with Retrospective Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13169/) (2025)
- [Actions Speak Louder than Words: Agent Decisions Reveal Implicit Biases in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17420/) (2025)
- [From Image to Language: A Critical Analysis of Visual Question Answering (VQA) Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00308/) (2023)
- [Stable Diffusion Exposed: Gender Bias from Prompt to Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03027/) (2023)
- [Fairness and Bias in Multimodal AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19097/) (2024)
- [HumaniBench: A Human-Centric Framework for Large Multimodal Models Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11454/) (2025)
- [Model-Agnostic Gender Debiased Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03693/) (2023)
- [Fairness and Bias Mitigation in Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02464/) (2024)
- [From Fake to Real: Pretraining on Balanced Synthetic Images to Prevent Spurious Correlations in Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04553/) (2023)
- [Value Imprint: A Technique for Auditing the Human Values Embedded in RLHF Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11937/) (2024)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Vision-Language Image Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03761/) (2023)
- [Adventures of Trustworthy Vision-Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04231/) (2023)
- [Meta-Learning via Classifier(-free) Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08942/) (2022)
- [Evaluating the Knowledge Dependency of Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11902/) (2022)
- [Combo of Thinking and Observing for Outside-Knowledge VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06407/) (2023)
- [Dissecting Multimodality in VideoQA Transformer Models by Impairing Modality Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08889/) (2023)
- [Building Trustworthy Multimodal AI: A Review of Fairness, Transparency, and Ethics in Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13199/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17530/) (2023)
- [SELECT: A Large-Scale Benchmark of Data Curation Strategies for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05057/) (2024)
- [The Visual Experience Dataset: Over 200 Recorded Hours of Integrated Eye Movement, Odometry, and Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18934/) (2024)
- [Designing a Direct Feedback Loop between Humans and Convolutional Neural Networks through Local Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04036/) (2023)
- [Challenges and Solutions in AI for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10600/) (2023)
- [When Tom Eats Kimchi: Evaluating Cultural Bias of Multimodal Large Language Models in Cultural Mixture Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16826/) (2025)
- [Attention IoU: Examining Biases in CelebA using Attention Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19846/) (2025)
- [VIGNETTE: Socially Grounded Bias Evaluation for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22897/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-and-language tasks have increasingly drawn more attention as a means to evaluate human-like reasoning in machine learning models. A popular task in the field is visual question answering (VQA), which aims to answer questions about images. However, VQA models have been shown to exploit language bias by learning the statistical correlations between questions and answers without looking into the image content: e.g., questions about the color of a banana are answered with yellow, even if the banana in the image is green. If societal bias (e.g., sexism, racism, ableism, etc.) is present in the training data, this problem may be causing VQA models to learn harmful stereotypes. For this reason, we investigate gender and racial bias in five VQA datasets. In our analysis, we find that the distribution of answers is highly different between questions about women and men, as well as the existence of detrimental gender-stereotypical samples. Likewise, we identify that specific race-related attributes are underrepresented, whereas potentially discriminatory samples appear in the analyzed datasets. Our findings suggest that there are dangers associated to using VQA datasets without considering and dealing with the potentially harmful stereotypes. We conclude the paper by proposing solutions to alleviate the problem before, during, and after the dataset collection process.