Identifying Implicit Social Biases in Vision-Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hamidieh, Kimia, Zhang, Haoran, Gerych, Walter, Hartvigsen, Thomas, Ghassemi, Marzyeh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909375926370304
author Hamidieh, Kimia
Zhang, Haoran
Gerych, Walter
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Ghassemi, Marzyeh
author_facet Hamidieh, Kimia
Zhang, Haoran
Gerych, Walter
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Ghassemi, Marzyeh
contents Vision-language models, like CLIP (Contrastive Language Image Pretraining), are becoming increasingly popular for a wide range of multimodal retrieval tasks. However, prior work has shown that large language and deep vision models can learn historical biases contained in their training sets, leading to perpetuation of stereotypes and potential downstream harm. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of the social biases that are present in CLIP, with a focus on the interaction between image and text modalities. We first propose a taxonomy of social biases called So-B-IT, which contains 374 words categorized across ten types of bias. Each type can lead to societal harm if associated with a particular demographic group. Using this taxonomy, we examine images retrieved by CLIP from a facial image dataset using each word as part of a prompt. We find that CLIP frequently displays undesirable associations between harmful words and specific demographic groups, such as retrieving mostly pictures of Middle Eastern men when asked to retrieve images of a "terrorist". Finally, we conduct an analysis of the source of such biases, by showing that the same harmful stereotypes are also present in a large image-text dataset used to train CLIP models for examples of biases that we find. Our findings highlight the importance of evaluating and addressing bias in vision-language models, and suggest the need for transparency and fairness-aware curation of large pre-training datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00997
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying Implicit Social Biases in Vision-Language Models
Hamidieh, Kimia
Zhang, Haoran
Gerych, Walter
Hartvigsen, Thomas
Ghassemi, Marzyeh
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Vision-language models, like CLIP (Contrastive Language Image Pretraining), are becoming increasingly popular for a wide range of multimodal retrieval tasks. However, prior work has shown that large language and deep vision models can learn historical biases contained in their training sets, leading to perpetuation of stereotypes and potential downstream harm. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of the social biases that are present in CLIP, with a focus on the interaction between image and text modalities. We first propose a taxonomy of social biases called So-B-IT, which contains 374 words categorized across ten types of bias. Each type can lead to societal harm if associated with a particular demographic group. Using this taxonomy, we examine images retrieved by CLIP from a facial image dataset using each word as part of a prompt. We find that CLIP frequently displays undesirable associations between harmful words and specific demographic groups, such as retrieving mostly pictures of Middle Eastern men when asked to retrieve images of a "terrorist". Finally, we conduct an analysis of the source of such biases, by showing that the same harmful stereotypes are also present in a large image-text dataset used to train CLIP models for examples of biases that we find. Our findings highlight the importance of evaluating and addressing bias in vision-language models, and suggest the need for transparency and fairness-aware curation of large pre-training datasets.
title Identifying Implicit Social Biases in Vision-Language Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00997