arXiv AI

Vision-Language Models Suppress Female Representations Under Ambiguous Input

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

GGSS: Geodesic-Gated Spherical Steering for Inference-Time Debiasing of Generative Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces GGSS (Geodesic‑Gated Spherical Steering), a norm‑preserving method for inference‑time debiasing of generative vision‑language models. GGSS identifies a counterfactual bias subspace on the unit hypersphere, steers visual tokens along geodesic arcs, and applies an adaptive gate to target tokens with strong demographic signals. Experiments on four generative VLMs show that GGSS achieves the lowest average bias across multiple tests while maintaining visual‑language performance within ±0.6 pp of the baseline.

By Yiqun Sun, Junyu Chen, Pengfei Wei, Lawrence B. Hsieh