DeepBias: Adaptive In-depth Probing of Social Biases in LVLMs
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Social bias and fairness in VLMs
Abstract (arXiv)
While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they remain highly susceptible to embedded social biases. Existing bias evaluation protocols predominantly rely on static datasets, which provide only a superficial assessment, as their fixed test cases cannot adaptively evolve to measure the true depth and limits of model vulnerabilities. We introduce DeepBias, an adaptive framework for the in-depth probing of social biases in LVLMs with carefully designed agents. Our approach operates through a dynamic ''generation-evolution-probing'' loop. First, a generative ProposerAgent synthesizes test data and is iteratively updated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) based on the target LVLM's responses, exploring model-specific failure modes. Second, an autonomous skill-driven DiggerAgent rewrites each test data across multiple probing turns, adaptively selecting from a curated skill library of deepening and rewriting strategies. At each turn, this process is conditioned on the model's previous response, enabling progressively deeper biases to be exposed. Furthermore, we build a benchmark named DeepBiasBench using our framework. By employing an ensemble of five diverse state-of-the-art LVLMs as anchors, the benchmark captures vulnerabilities shared across architectures. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and show that DeepBias provides a challenging benchmark for in-depth bias evaluation, establishing an evolutionary paradigm for LVLM safety assessment.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (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 52 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.
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52 of 60 references.
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- 2023VisoGender: A dataset for benchmarking gender bias in image-text pronoun resolution21 Jun
- 2022Counterfactually Measuring and Eliminating Social Bias in Vision-Language Pre-training Models3 Jul
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