# GELDA: A generative language annotation framework to reveal visual biases in datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18064/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Florence: A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11432/) (2021)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [AI Fairness 360: An Extensible Toolkit for Detecting, Understanding, and Mitigating Unwanted Algorithmic Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01943/) (2018)
- [Language in a Bottle: Language Model Guided Concept Bottlenecks for Interpretable Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11158/) (2022)
- [Improving CLIP Training with Language Rewrites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20088/) (2023)
- [REPAIR: Removing Representation Bias by Dataset Resampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07911/) (2019)
- [Towards Fairer Datasets: Filtering and Balancing the Distribution of the People Subtree in the ImageNet Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07726/) (2019)
- [Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10356/) (2021)
- [Prompt, Generate, then Cache: Cascade of Foundation Models makes Strong Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02151/) (2023)
- [REVISE: A Tool for Measuring and Mitigating Bias in Visual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07999/) (2020)
- [Fair Attribute Classification through Latent Space De-biasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01469/) (2020)
- [Demographic Bias in Biometrics: A Survey on an Emerging Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02488/) (2020)
- [A Deeper Look at Dataset Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.01257/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Attention IoU: Examining Biases in CelebA using Attention Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19846/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bias analysis is a crucial step in the process of creating fair datasets for training and evaluating computer vision models. The bottleneck in dataset analysis is annotation, which typically requires: (1) specifying a list of attributes relevant to the dataset domain, and (2) classifying each image-attribute pair. While the second step has made rapid progress in automation, the first has remained human-centered, requiring an experimenter to compile lists of in-domain attributes. However, an experimenter may have limited foresight leading to annotation "blind spots," which in turn can lead to flawed downstream dataset analyses. To combat this, we propose GELDA, a nearly automatic framework that leverages large generative language models (LLMs) to propose and label various attributes for a domain. GELDA takes a user-defined domain caption (e.g., "a photo of a bird," "a photo of a living room") and uses an LLM to hierarchically generate attributes. In addition, GELDA uses the LLM to decide which of a set of vision-language models (VLMs) to use to classify each attribute in images. Results on real datasets show that GELDA can generate accurate and diverse visual attribute suggestions, and uncover biases such as confounding between class labels and background features. Results on synthetic datasets demonstrate that GELDA can be used to evaluate the biases of text-to-image diffusion models and generative adversarial networks. Overall, we show that while GELDA is not accurate enough to replace human annotators, it can serve as a complementary tool to help humans analyze datasets in a cheap, low-effort, and flexible manner.