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.
By Zhipeng Zhao, Zhaoqiang Wei, Peishun Liu, Youwei Zhao, Ruichun Tang
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
By Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2610.08401v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: While recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown outstanding performance across diverse applications, they tend to under-use visual information...
By Seulgi Kim, Zhixiong Zhang, Xinwei Zhang, Jie Ling, Ronn Shaw
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...
By Yisong Xiao, Aishan Liu, Yongxin Huang, Zonghao Ying, Shiji Zhao, Tianlin Li, Yong Han, Jian Yang, Xianglong Liu
The paper investigates how in‑context learning (ICL) in large vision‑language models (LVLMs) can amplify gender bias. Using the VL‑BICLE framework, the authors show that gendered ICL demonstrations shift model bias toward the demonstrated gender, especially in tasks involving gendered language such as image captioning and pronoun prediction. They find that similarity‑based retrieval does not mitigate this bias and that replacing real images with synthetic ones from stable diffusion reduces bias without hurting caption quality.
By Tong Xiang, Noa Garcia, Yuta Nakashima
The paper presents the first systematic reliability evaluation of diffusion-based Large Vision‑Language Models (dLVLMs), comparing six diffusion models to autoregressive (AR) baselines across four dimensions. Key findings include a reversal of the yes‑bias seen in AR models for binary visual queries, competitive hallucination rates but lower linguistic quality, near‑zero accuracy for underrepresented racial groups with opposite‑polarity gender bias, and accuracy collapse in multiple‑choice tasks when the correct option is shorter than distractors due to a length prior emerging at the first denoising step. Additionally, tokens committed late in denoising with low confidence correlate with hallucinated content, indicating a unique mechanistic signal in diffusion generation.
By Md. Atabuzzaman, Chris Thomas