mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Examining Gender and Racial Bias in Large Vision-Language Models Using a Novel Dataset of Parallel Images

arXiv 2402.05779 ↗First posted 8 Feb 2024cs.CY cs.CL cs.CVcited by 55

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Social bias and fairness in VLMs

Abstract (arXiv)

Following on recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and subsequent chat models, a new wave of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has emerged. Such models can incorporate images as input in addition to text, and perform tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, story generation, etc. Here, we examine potential gender and racial biases in such systems, based on the perceived characteristics of the people in the input images. To accomplish this, we present a new dataset PAIRS (PArallel Images for eveRyday Scenarios). The PAIRS dataset contains sets of AI-generated images of people, such that the images are highly similar in terms of background and visual content, but differ along the dimensions of gender (man, woman) and race (Black, white). By querying the LVLMs with such images, we observe significant differences in the responses according to the perceived gender or race of the person depicted.

Key facts. Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Social bias and fairness in VLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 29 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2024.

Builds on

29 of 58 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023DeAR: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Additive Residuals18 Mar
  2. 2023Debiasing Vision-Language Models via Biased Prompts31 Jan
  3. 2023Vision-Language Models Performing Zero-Shot Tasks Exhibit Gender-based Disparities26 Jan
  4. 2022Counterfactually Measuring and Eliminating Social Bias in Vision-Language Pre-training Models3 Jul
  5. 2022A Prompt Array Keeps the Bias Away: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Adversarial Learning22 Mar

Other references · 24

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
  3. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 13,958
  4. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  5. 2023InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuningcited by 2,855
  6. 2016Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotationscited by 2,646
  7. 2021LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairscited by 1,544
  8. 2021Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Conceptscited by 1,209
  9. 2023mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodalitycited by 1,038
  10. 2022EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scalecited by 685
  11. 2021Multimodal datasets: misogyny, pornography, and malignant stereotypescited by 326
  12. 2022Easily Accessible Text-to-Image Generation Amplifies Demographic Stereotypes at Large Scalecited by 262
12 more
  1. 2018Women also Snowboard: Overcoming Bias in Captioning Modelscited by 236
  2. 2023Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Modelscited by 204
  3. 2021Evaluating CLIP: Towards Characterization of Broader Capabilities and Downstream Implicationscited by 128
  4. 2021Understanding and Evaluating Racial Biases in Image Captioningcited by 108
  5. 2021Are Gender-Neutral Queries Really Gender-Neutral? Mitigating Gender Bias in Image Searchcited by 90
  6. 2020Mitigating Gender Bias in Captioning Systemscited by 50
  7. 2022Contrastive Language-Vision AI Models Pretrained on Web-Scraped Multimodal Data Exhibit Sexual Objectification Biascited by 43
  8. 2022Gender and Racial Bias in Visual Question Answering Datasetscited by 39
  9. 2019Exposing and Correcting the Gender Bias in Image Captioning Datasets and Modelscited by 36
  10. 2022Underspecification in Scene Description-to-Depiction Taskscited by 30
  11. 2022FairCLIP: Social Bias Elimination based on Attribute Prototype Learning and Representation Neutralizationcited by 20
  12. 2021Computer Vision and Conflicting Values: Describing People with Automated Alt Textcited by 14

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 18; 2025: 26; 2026: 11.

55 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2025A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deploymentcited by 110
  2. 2024VHELM: A Holistic Evaluation of Vision Language Modelscited by 53
  3. 2025Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applicationscited by 35
  4. 2024GenderBias-VL: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Vision Language Models via Counterfactual Probingcited by 31
  5. 2024Uncovering Bias in Large Vision-Language Models at Scale with Counterfactualscited by 27
  6. 2024Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Summary-Guided Decodingcited by 21
  7. 2024Assessing Dialect Fairness and Robustness of Large Language Models in Reasoning Taskscited by 20
  8. 2025HumaniBench: A Human-Centric Framework for Large Multimodal Models Evaluationcited by 19
  9. 2025A Survey on Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Modelcited by 19
  10. 2024Evaluating Fairness in Large Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Demographic Attributes and Promptscited by 15
  11. 2024Revealing and Reducing Gender Biases in Vision and Language Assistants (VLAs)cited by 15
  12. 2025AI Sees Your Location, But With A Bias Toward The Wealthy Worldcited by 14
38 more
  1. 2024ONEBench to Test Them All: Sample-Level Benchmarking Over Open-Ended Capabilitiescited by 13
  2. 2025A Large Scale Analysis of Gender Biases in Text-to-Image Generative Modelscited by 12
  3. 2024A Unified Framework and Dataset for Assessing Societal Bias in Vision-Language Modelscited by 11
  4. 2024Social Perception of Faces in a Vision-Language Modelcited by 10
  5. 2025BBQ-V: Benchmarking Visual Stereotype Bias in Large Multimodal Modelscited by 10
  6. 2024Uncovering Bias in Large Vision-Language Models with Counterfactualscited by 9
  7. 2024Social Debiasing for Fair Multi-modal LLMscited by 8
  8. 2024Natural Language Inference Improves Compositionality in Vision-Language Modelscited by 8
  9. 2025VLDBench Evaluating Multimodal Disinformation with Regulatory Alignmentcited by 8
  10. 2025Better Safe Than Sorry? Overreaction Problem of Vision Language Models in Visual Emergency Recognitioncited by 7
  11. 2025Bias Is a Subspace, Not a Coordinate: A Geometric Rethinking of Post-hoc Debiasing in Vision-Language Modelscited by 7
  12. 2025Vision-Language Models display a strong gender biascited by 5
  13. 2025Bias in Gender Bias Benchmarks: How Spurious Features Distort Evaluationcited by 5
  14. 2024Dataset Scale and Societal Consistency Mediate Facial Impression Bias in Vision-Language AIcited by 4
  15. 2025LVLM-Compress-Bench: Benchmarking the Broader Impact of Large Vision-Language Model Compressioncited by 4
  16. 2025Neutralizing the Narrative: AI-Powered Debiasing of Online News Articlescited by 4
  17. 2025Unveiling the "Fairness Seesaw": Discovering and Mitigating Gender and Race Bias in Vision-Language Modelscited by 4
  18. 2024They're All Doctors: Synthesizing Diverse Counterfactuals to Mitigate Associative Biascited by 3
  19. 2025When Tom Eats Kimchi: Evaluating Cultural Bias of Multimodal Large Language Models in Cultural Mixture Contextscited by 3
  20. 2025AI Should Sense Better, Not Just Scale Bigger: Adaptive Sensing as a Paradigm Shiftcited by 3
  21. 2025Bias in the Picture: Benchmarking VLMs with Social-Cue News Images and LLM-as-Judge Assessmentcited by 3
  22. 2025DSO: Direct Steering Optimization for Bias Mitigationcited by 3
  23. 2024Is What You Ask For What You Get? Investigating Concept Associations in Text-to-Image Modelscited by 2
  24. 2025Playing Devil's Advocate: Unmasking Toxicity and Vulnerabilities in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 2
  25. 2025From Individuals to Interactions: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Multimodal Large Language Models from the Lens of Social Relationshipcited by 2
  26. 2025Ask Me Again Differently: GRAS for Measuring Bias in Vision Language Models on Gender, Race, Age, and Skin Tonecited by 2
  27. 2026Measuring Social Bias in Vision-Language Models with Face-Only Counterfactuals from Real Photoscited by 2
  28. 2026Cultural Counterfactuals: Evaluating Cultural Biases in Large Vision-Language Models with Counterfactual Examplescited by 2
  29. 2026VIBE: Voice-Induced open-ended Bias Evaluation for Large Audio-Language Models via Real-World Speechcited by 2
  30. 2024debiaSAE: Benchmarking and Mitigating Vision-Language Model Biascited by 1
  31. 2025A Stereotype Content Analysis on Color-related Social Bias in Large Vision Language Modelscited by 1
  32. 2025Interpreting Social Bias in LVLMs via Information Flow Analysis and Multi-Round Dialogue Evaluationcited by 1
  33. 2026Tracing the Latent Threads: A Mechanistic Study of How LLMs Represent and Operationalize Race and Ethnicity Cuescited by 1
  34. 2026Bias at the End of the Scorecited by 1
  35. 2026Vision-Language Models Suppress Female Representations Under Ambiguous Inputcited by 1
  36. 2024Debias your Large Multi-Modal Model at Test-Time via Non-Contrastive Visual Attribute Steeringcited by 0
  37. 2025On the Reproducibility of "FairCLIP: Harnessing Fairness in Vision-Language Learning''cited by 0
  38. 2025The Face of Persuasion: Analyzing Bias and Generating Culture-Aware Adscited by 0

50 most cited of 55 All 55 (JSON)

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Breaking Language Barriers or Reinforcing Bias? A Study of Gender and Racial Disparities in Multilingual Contrastive Vision Language Models
  2. 2023MultiModal Bias: Introducing a Framework for Stereotypical Bias Assessment beyond Gender and Race in Vision Language Models
  3. 2024VLBiasBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Bias in Large Vision-Language Model
  4. 2024Images Speak Louder than Words: Understanding and Mitigating Bias in Vision-Language Model from a Causal Mediation Perspective
  5. 2025VisBias: Measuring Explicit and Implicit Social Biases in Vision Language Models
  6. 2023VisoGender: A dataset for benchmarking gender bias in image-text pronoun resolution
  7. 2025Freeze and Reveal: Exposing Modality Bias in Vision-Language Models
  8. 2026Gender Bias in Vision-Language In-Context Learning