mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Owls are wise and foxes are unfaithful: Uncovering animal stereotypes in vision-language models

arXiv 2501.12433 ↗First posted 21 Jan 2025cs.CV cs.AI cs.CLcited by 1

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Animal stereotypes are deeply embedded in human culture and language. They often shape our perceptions and expectations of various species. Our study investigates how animal stereotypes manifest in vision-language models during the task of image generation. Through targeted prompts, we explore whether DALL-E perpetuates stereotypical representations of animals, such as "owls as wise," "foxes as unfaithful," etc. Our findings reveal significant stereotyped instances where the model consistently generates images aligned with cultural biases. The current work is the first of its kind to examine animal stereotyping in vision-language models systematically and to highlight a critical yet underexplored dimension of bias in AI-generated visual content.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 7 of its 9 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2025.

Builds on

7 of 9 references.

References · 7

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  2. 2021Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generationcited by 4,276
  3. 2020StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language modelscited by 911
  4. 2023A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 898
  5. 2021Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Modelscited by 376
  6. 2022Thinking Fast and Slow in Large Language Modelscited by 136
  7. 2024Gender Bias in Text-to-Video Generation Models: A case study of Soracited by 8

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Citing papers per year: 2025: 1.

1 paper.

  1. 2025Surgeons Are Indian Males and Speech Therapists Are White Females: Auditing Biases in Vision-Language Models for Healthcare Professionalscited by 1

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  4. 2026Prototypicality Bias Reveals Blindspots in Multimodal Evaluation Metrics
  5. 2025VisBias: Measuring Explicit and Implicit Social Biases in Vision Language Models
  6. 2025A Stereotype Content Analysis on Color-related Social Bias in Large Vision Language Models
  7. 2025BBQ-V: Benchmarking Visual Stereotype Bias in Large Multimodal Models
  8. 2025VIGNETTE: Socially Grounded Bias Evaluation for Vision-Language Models