GenderBias-\emph{VL}: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Vision Language Models via Counterfactual Probing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00600v1
• Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2024 05:55:15 GMT
• Title: GenderBias-\emph{VL}: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Vision Language Models via Counterfactual Probing
• Authors: Yisong Xiao, Aishan Liu, QianJia Cheng, Zhenfei Yin, Siyuan Liang, Jiapeng Li, Jing Shao, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao,
• Abstract summary: This paper introduces the GenderBias-emphVL benchmark to evaluate occupation-related gender bias in Large Vision-Language Models. Using our benchmark, we extensively evaluate 15 commonly used open-source LVLMs and state-of-the-art commercial APIs. Our findings reveal widespread gender biases in existing LVLMs.
• Score: 72.0343083866144
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have been widely adopted in various applications; however, they exhibit significant gender biases. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate gender bias at the demographic group level, neglecting individual fairness, which emphasizes equal treatment of similar individuals. This research gap limits the detection of discriminatory behaviors, as individual fairness offers a more granular examination of biases that group fairness may overlook. For the first time, this paper introduces the GenderBias-\emph{VL} benchmark to evaluate occupation-related gender bias in LVLMs using counterfactual visual questions under individual fairness criteria. To construct this benchmark, we first utilize text-to-image diffusion models to generate occupation images and their gender counterfactuals. Subsequently, we generate corresponding textual occupation options by identifying stereotyped occupation pairs with high semantic similarity but opposite gender proportions in real-world statistics. This method enables the creation of large-scale visual question counterfactuals to expose biases in LVLMs, applicable in both multimodal and unimodal contexts through modifying gender attributes in specific modalities. Overall, our GenderBias-\emph{VL} benchmark comprises 34,581 visual question counterfactual pairs, covering 177 occupations. Using our benchmark, we extensively evaluate 15 commonly used open-source LVLMs (\eg, LLaVA) and state-of-the-art commercial APIs, including GPT-4o and Gemini-Pro. Our findings reveal widespread gender biases in existing LVLMs. Our benchmark offers: (1) a comprehensive dataset for occupation-related gender bias evaluation; (2) an up-to-date leaderboard on LVLM biases; and (3) a nuanced understanding of the biases presented by these models. \footnote{The dataset and code are available at the \href{https://genderbiasvl.github.io/}{website}.}

Related papers

• The Root Shapes the Fruit: On the Persistence of Gender-Exclusive Harms in Aligned Language Models [58.130894823145205]
  We center transgender, nonbinary, and other gender-diverse identities to investigate how alignment procedures interact with pre-existing gender-diverse bias. Our findings reveal that DPO-aligned models are particularly sensitive to supervised finetuning. We conclude with recommendations tailored to DPO and broader alignment practices.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-11-06T06:50:50Z)
• Revealing and Reducing Gender Biases in Vision and Language Assistants (VLAs) [82.57490175399693]
  We study gender bias in 22 popular image-to-text vision-language assistants (VLAs) Our results show that VLAs replicate human biases likely present in the data, such as real-world occupational imbalances. To eliminate the gender bias in these models, we find that finetuning-based debiasing methods achieve the best tradeoff between debiasing and retaining performance on downstream tasks.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-25T05:59:44Z)
• GenderCARE: A Comprehensive Framework for Assessing and Reducing Gender Bias in Large Language Models [73.23743278545321]
  Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in natural language generation, but have also been observed to magnify societal biases. GenderCARE is a comprehensive framework that encompasses innovative Criteria, bias Assessment, Reduction techniques, and Evaluation metrics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-22T15:35:46Z)
• GABInsight: Exploring Gender-Activity Binding Bias in Vision-Language Models [3.018378575149671]
  We show that vision-language models (VLMs) are biased towards identifying the individual with the expected gender as the performer of the activity. We refer to this bias in associating an activity with the gender of its actual performer in an image or text as the Gender-Activity Binding (GAB) bias. Our experiments indicate that VLMs experience an average performance decline of about 13.2% when confronted with gender-activity binding bias.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-30T17:46:06Z)
• VLBiasBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Bias in Large Vision-Language Model [72.13121434085116]
  VLBiasBench is a benchmark aimed at evaluating biases in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) We construct a dataset encompassing nine distinct categories of social biases, including age, disability status, gender, nationality, physical appearance, race, religion, profession, social economic status and two intersectional bias categories (race x gender, and race x social economic status) We conduct extensive evaluations on 15 open-source models as well as one advanced closed-source model, providing some new insights into the biases revealing from these models.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-20T10:56:59Z)
• JobFair: A Framework for Benchmarking Gender Hiring Bias in Large Language Models [12.12628747941818]
  This paper presents a novel framework for benchmarking hierarchical gender hiring bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) for resume scoring. We introduce a new construct grounded in labour economics, legal principles, and critiques of current bias benchmarks. We analyze gender hiring biases in ten state-of-the-art LLMs.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-17T09:15:57Z)
• VisoGender: A dataset for benchmarking gender bias in image-text pronoun resolution [80.57383975987676]
  VisoGender is a novel dataset for benchmarking gender bias in vision-language models. We focus on occupation-related biases within a hegemonic system of binary gender, inspired by Winograd and Winogender schemas. We benchmark several state-of-the-art vision-language models and find that they demonstrate bias in resolving binary gender in complex scenes.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-21T17:59:51Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.