FairLens is a benchmark and evaluation framework that measures fairness and validity of vision‑language models (VLMs) in high‑stakes domains such as hiring, legal, and healthcare. It uses over 100,000 face‑image and question pairs covering gender, race, and age, and assesses responses through demographic parity, soundness, demographic association, and bias in free‑text generation. The study finds that VLMs often make unwarranted inferences from faces rather than abstaining, especially in legal and healthcare contexts, and that small parity gaps can still hide unsafe treatment across groups.
By Vahid Reza Khazaie, Ahmed Y. Radwan, Shaina Raza
arXiv:2603. 03989v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When visual evidence is ambiguous, vision models must decide how to interpret face-like patterns.
By Qianpu Chen, Derya Soydaner, Rob Saunders
arXiv:2608.23313v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language model safety benchmarks typically evaluate only final responses: whether a model refuses, warns, or complies. This outcome-level view c...
By Xuetong Li, Gaofeng Liu
Aligned vision‑language models (VLMs) are designed to combine grounded visual reasoning with safe generation. The study finds that when safety constraints are applied, these models often abstain from answering questions that they could answer under default instruction, yet visual evidence continues to influence the decoding process. The authors show that safety‑induced abstention alters late‑stage hidden‑state dynamics, and that targeted interventions can restore grounded answering without retraining or changing visual inputs.
The paper introduces MPS-Bench, a benchmark of 5,181 scenarios from 584 real-world images across 12 high-risk domains, each paired with a hidden user profile, to evaluate personalized safety in vision‑language models (VLMs). Eight leading VLMs were tested and found to almost always respond directly (86‑99%) without seeking missing context, scoring no higher than 2.6/5 on personalized safety. The authors identify a phenomenon called visual dominance, where visual information enters text representations early and suppresses textual risk signals, and propose PRISM, a lightweight input monitor that predicts when a query should be deferred, achieving 0.978 AUC and outperforming all tested models on the safety‑utility Pareto frontier.
By Edward Sun, Yuchen Wu, Zixian Ma, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Yijia Xiao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ranjay Krishna, Wei Wang, Jindong Wang, Aylin Caliskan
arXiv:2608. 04509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language systems combine images with retrieved text, but these sources can disagree or jointly fail to support an answer.
By De Jiang, Zhengyang Zhang, Kehong Yuan, Shaohua Ma
arXiv:2606. 25375v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the rapid adoption of generative AI, synthetic medical images pose growing risks, including diagnostic deception and insurance fraud.
By Ching-Hao Chiu, Hao-Wei Chung, Gelei Xu, Xueyang Li, Pin-Yu Chen, John Kheir, Meysam Ghaffari, Carlos Morato, Ahmed Abbasi, Yiyu Shi
arXiv:2607. 22745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid advances in image generation are eroding the evidentiary value of visual content in settings where authenticity can affect public safety and personal reputation.
By Yi-Zhi Wang, Yichen Xiao, Linan Yue, Weibo Gao, Yichao Du, Pengfei Fang, Shimin Di, Min-Ling Zhang
arXiv:2601. 04946v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatic metrics are widely used to evaluate text-to-image models, often replacing human judgment in benchmarking, model selection, and large-scale data filtering.
By Subhadeep Roy, Gagan Bhatia, Steffen Eger
MedProb is a lightweight probing framework that predicts multiple-choice medical visual question answering (Med‑VQA) answers directly from frozen vision‑language model (VLM) representations, avoiding free‑text generation. On datasets such as PATH‑VQA, SLAKE, and VQA‑RAD, MedProb extracts more answer‑relevant signal than prompting and outperforms both medical VLMs and agentic systems. The approach also narrows the performance gap between small and large models, shows that medical adaptation does not consistently improve linear decodability, and reveals positional biases in both prompting and generation.
By Erfan Nourbakhsh, Ke Yang, Anthony Rios
arXiv:2609.37863v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in place of human annotators, making it important that substitutability tests reflect the model r...
By Nagham Omar, Mahmoud Jabarin, Kinan Ibraheem, Lotem Peled-Cohen
arXiv:2608.29590v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose a societal bias evaluation method for large vision-language models (LVLMs) in the era of strong safety guardrails. Existing benchmarks rely...
By Yusuke Hirota, Michael Ross Boone, Arun George Zachariah, Jibin Rajan Varghese, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Boyi Li, Ryo Hachiuma