Multilingual Text-to-Image Generation Magnifies Gender Stereotypes and Prompt Engineering May Not Help You

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Friedrich, Felix, Hämmerl, Katharina, Schramowski, Patrick, Brack, Manuel, Libovicky, Jindrich, Kersting, Kristian, Fraser, Alexander
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Friedrich, Felix
Hämmerl, Katharina
Schramowski, Patrick
Brack, Manuel
Libovicky, Jindrich
Kersting, Kristian
Fraser, Alexander
author_facet Friedrich, Felix
Hämmerl, Katharina
Schramowski, Patrick
Brack, Manuel
Libovicky, Jindrich
Kersting, Kristian
Fraser, Alexander
contents Text-to-image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality, flexibility, and text alignment, and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Through improvements in multilingual abilities, a larger community now has access to this technology. However, our results show that multilingual models suffer from significant gender biases just as monolingual models do. Furthermore, the natural expectation that multilingual models will provide similar results across languages does not hold up. Instead, there are important differences between languages. We propose a novel benchmark, MAGBIG, intended to foster research on gender bias in multilingual models. We use MAGBIG to investigate the effect of multilingualism on gender bias in T2I models. To this end, we construct multilingual prompts requesting portraits of people with a certain occupation or trait. Our results show that not only do models exhibit strong gender biases but they also behave differently across languages. Furthermore, we investigate prompt engineering strategies, such as indirect, neutral formulations, to mitigate these biases. Unfortunately, these approaches have limited success and result in worse text-to-image alignment. Consequently, we call for more research into diverse representations across languages in image generators, as well as into steerability to address biased model behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_16092
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multilingual Text-to-Image Generation Magnifies Gender Stereotypes and Prompt Engineering May Not Help You
Friedrich, Felix
Hämmerl, Katharina
Schramowski, Patrick
Brack, Manuel
Libovicky, Jindrich
Kersting, Kristian
Fraser, Alexander
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Text-to-image generation models have recently achieved astonishing results in image quality, flexibility, and text alignment, and are consequently employed in a fast-growing number of applications. Through improvements in multilingual abilities, a larger community now has access to this technology. However, our results show that multilingual models suffer from significant gender biases just as monolingual models do. Furthermore, the natural expectation that multilingual models will provide similar results across languages does not hold up. Instead, there are important differences between languages. We propose a novel benchmark, MAGBIG, intended to foster research on gender bias in multilingual models. We use MAGBIG to investigate the effect of multilingualism on gender bias in T2I models. To this end, we construct multilingual prompts requesting portraits of people with a certain occupation or trait. Our results show that not only do models exhibit strong gender biases but they also behave differently across languages. Furthermore, we investigate prompt engineering strategies, such as indirect, neutral formulations, to mitigate these biases. Unfortunately, these approaches have limited success and result in worse text-to-image alignment. Consequently, we call for more research into diverse representations across languages in image generators, as well as into steerability to address biased model behavior.
title Multilingual Text-to-Image Generation Magnifies Gender Stereotypes and Prompt Engineering May Not Help You
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16092