@inproceedings{ruggeri-nozza-2023-multi,
    title = "A Multi-dimensional study on Bias in Vision-Language models",
    author = "Ruggeri, Gabriele  and
      Nozza, Debora",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.403",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.403",
    pages = "6445--6455",
    abstract = "In recent years, joint Vision-Language (VL) models have increased in popularity and capability. Very few studies have attempted to investigate bias in VL models, even though it is a well-known issue in both individual modalities. This paper presents the first multi-dimensional analysis of bias in English VL models, focusing on gender, ethnicity, and age as dimensions. When subjects are input as images, pre-trained VL models complete a neutral template with a hurtful word 5{\%} of the time, with higher percentages for female and young subjects. Bias presence in downstream models has been tested on Visual Question Answering. We developed a novel bias metric called the Vision-Language Association Test based on questions designed to elicit biased associations between stereotypical concepts and targets. Our findings demonstrate that pre-trained VL models contain biases that are perpetuated in downstream tasks.",
}

In recent years, joint Vision-Language (VL) models have increased in popularity and capability. Very few studies have attempted to investigate bias in VL models, even though it is a well-known issue in both individual modalities. This paper presents the first multi-dimensional analysis of bias in English VL models, focusing on gender, ethnicity, and age as dimensions. When subjects are input as images, pre-trained VL models complete a neutral template with a hurtful word 5{\%} of the time, with higher percentages for female and young subjects. Bias presence in downstream models has been tested on Visual Question Answering. We developed a novel bias metric called the Vision-Language Association Test based on questions designed to elicit biased associations between stereotypical concepts and targets. Our findings demonstrate that pre-trained VL models contain biases that are perpetuated in downstream tasks.
Ruggeri, Gabriele Nozza, Debora
A Multi-dimensional study on Bias in Vision-Language models