The paper introduces ChartBias, a benchmark of 820 real-world charts covering six social attributes, designed to audit bias in vision‑language models (VLMs) that interpret charts. Across 12 VLMs, the study identifies three failure modes—narrative shift, group hallucination, and preference polarity—where models produce different or misleading narratives when the referenced social group changes. A multi‑agent mitigation framework is proposed, separating evidence extraction from group‑conditioned generation and using a counterfactual judge, which reduces narrative shift while maintaining chart‑grounded reasoning.
arXiv:2607. 22600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Information visualizations are widely used to communicate patterns, trends, and outliers, yet deceptive design choices-such as truncated or inverted axes, distorted aspect ratios, inappropriate encodings, and misleading color mappings-can systematically alter interpretation while preserving the underlying data.
arXiv:2608.21415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks; however, they often inherit social biases fro...
arXiv:2601.12868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in high-stakes settings where demographic attributes such as race and ethnicity may be expl...
arXiv:2603. 28583v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), misleading charts remain a significant challenge due to their deceptive visual structures and distorted data representations.
The paper introduces a novel framework for assessing second‑order bias in large language models (LLMs), defined as bias in how an LLM judges the acceptability of biased content. Using principles from entitlement epistemology, the authors design a reasoning task that asks LLMs to determine whether a biased text is acceptable for specific demographic groups, and propose two metrics to quantify biased judgments. Experiments on both open‑source and closed‑source models reveal that the task bypasses safety guardrails, uncovers systematic variations across target groups, and demonstrates that models still rely on demographic labels when evaluating bias.
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...
BiasGym is a cost‑effective, generalizable framework that injects specific biases into large language models via token‑based fine‑tuning while keeping the model frozen. It then uses two debiasing methods—Scope and Steer—to identify and suppress or redirect the components responsible for biased behavior. The framework enables consistent bias elicitation, precise localization of bias associations, and targeted debiasing without harming downstream performance, and it has been shown to reduce real‑world stereotypes such as labeling Italians as reckless drivers.
The paper introduces ViD, a vision‑dominant gender bias mitigation framework for large vision‑language models. ViD uses causal analysis of attention patterns and dual mechanisms—backdoor adjustment and refined token selection—to suppress bias while preserving reasoning and generation quality. Experiments show a 14.7% reduction in gender bias on FACET and significant improvements on MS COCO image captioning, all without extra training overhead.
As Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in critical applications, robustly evaluating their social biases is paramount. However, the current literature suffers from widespread methodological fragmentation, which yields contradictory conclusions.
arXiv:2606. 19344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit representational and syntactic biases that are difficult to evaluate due to the stochastic nature of text generation.
arXiv:2609.24172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legends are fundamental to chart understanding, as reliable interpretation requires correctly binding legend entries to corresponding visual marks. Whi...
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.