Mitigating Bias in Large Vision-Language Models via Counterfactual Ensemble Decoding
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arXiv:2512. 00807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) inherit significant social biases from their training data, notably in gender representation.
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.
arXiv:2607. 21300v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine unlearning has emerged as a tool for removing personal data from trained models to comply with recent AI regulations.
arXiv:2603.02370v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have grown increasingly powerful in recent years, but can also exhibit harmful biases. Prior studies investiga...
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.
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.