This paper examines how two popular vision‑language models encode protected identities when asked to transform human face images to reflect race and sexual orientation. The authors find that the models often comply with such requests, with compliance being non‑deterministic and group‑sensitive, and that the generated images are statistically distinguishable and tend to reinforce deep‑seated stereotypes. They also show that these representation biases can reappear in textual reasoning tasks and that image generation can perpetuate bias around criminality, raising concerns about AI‑assisted profiling.
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.
arXiv:2508. 03483v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While prior research on text-to-image generation has predominantly focused on biases in human depictions, demographic bias in generated objects remains relatively underexplored.
arXiv:2610.19717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-fidelity, identity-preserving image generation for personalized applications such as digital avat...
arXiv:2512. 08724v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-to-image (TTI) diffusion models have achieved remarkable visual quality, yet they have been repeatedly shown to exhibit social biases across sensitive attributes such as gender, race and age.
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...
arXiv:2610.16622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the advancement in language modeling, research on adversarial images has recently shifted from image classifiers to vision-language models (VLMs...
The paper investigates how Vision Language Models (VLMs) can be fooled by tiny, human‑imperceptible changes to images. It introduces a gradient‑based attack that targets only the vision encoder, reducing computational cost while still effectively disrupting both untargeted and targeted multimodal interpretations. Experiments on open‑source VLMs such as Qwen2.5‑VL, Granite‑Vision, FastVLM, and Phi‑3.5‑Vision demonstrate that these small perturbations can dramatically alter the models’ textual outputs.
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.
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.
arXiv:2609.05540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many medical conditions require diagnosis through detailed, multi-context clinical assessment rather than from visual appearance alone. Despite this,...
The paper investigates how Vision Language Models (VLMs) can be fooled by small, human‑imperceptible changes to images. It introduces a gradient‑based attack that targets only the vision encoder, reducing computational cost while still effectively disrupting both untargeted and targeted multimodal alignment. Experiments on open‑source VLMs such as Qwen2.5‑VL, Granite‑Vision, FastVLM, and Phi‑3.5‑Vision demonstrate that these perturbations can significantly alter the models’ textual outputs.
FORGE is a forensic deepfake analysis system that provides region‑grounded natural language explanations for image manipulations. It addresses the inductive bias mismatch of multimodal large language models by adding a Vision‑Only Model trained on dense patch prediction, allowing the language model to interleave tokens with preserved spatial correspondence. Across face‑manipulated and fully synthetic content, FORGE delivers fine‑grained attribute queries and outperforms in‑domain baselines, with region‑specific evaluation and human studies confirming explanation faithfulness.