On Fairness of Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for Image Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liu, Ming, Chen, Hao, Wang, Jindong, Wang, Liwen, Ramakrishnan, Bhiksha Raj, Zhang, Wensheng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Liu, Ming
Chen, Hao
Wang, Jindong
Wang, Liwen
Ramakrishnan, Bhiksha Raj
Zhang, Wensheng
author_facet Liu, Ming
Chen, Hao
Wang, Jindong
Wang, Liwen
Ramakrishnan, Bhiksha Raj
Zhang, Wensheng
contents Unified multimodal large language models (U-MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in visual understanding and generation in an end-to-end pipeline. Compared with generation-only models (e.g., Stable Diffusion), U-MLLMs may raise new questions about bias in their outputs, which can be affected by their unified capabilities. This gap is particularly concerning given the under-explored risk of propagating harmful stereotypes. In this paper, we benchmark the latest U-MLLMs and find that most exhibit significant demographic biases, such as gender and race bias. To better understand and mitigate this issue, we propose a locate-then-fix strategy, where we audit and show how the individual model component is affected by bias. Our analysis shows that bias originates primarily from the language model. More interestingly, we observe a "partial alignment" phenomenon in U-MLLMs, where understanding bias appears minimal, but generation bias remains substantial. Thus, we propose a novel balanced preference model to balance the demographic distribution with synthetic data. Experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces demographic bias while preserving semantic fidelity. We hope our findings underscore the need for more holistic interpretation and debiasing strategies of U-MLLMs in the future.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_03429
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Fairness of Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for Image Generation
Liu, Ming
Chen, Hao
Wang, Jindong
Wang, Liwen
Ramakrishnan, Bhiksha Raj
Zhang, Wensheng
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Unified multimodal large language models (U-MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in visual understanding and generation in an end-to-end pipeline. Compared with generation-only models (e.g., Stable Diffusion), U-MLLMs may raise new questions about bias in their outputs, which can be affected by their unified capabilities. This gap is particularly concerning given the under-explored risk of propagating harmful stereotypes. In this paper, we benchmark the latest U-MLLMs and find that most exhibit significant demographic biases, such as gender and race bias. To better understand and mitigate this issue, we propose a locate-then-fix strategy, where we audit and show how the individual model component is affected by bias. Our analysis shows that bias originates primarily from the language model. More interestingly, we observe a "partial alignment" phenomenon in U-MLLMs, where understanding bias appears minimal, but generation bias remains substantial. Thus, we propose a novel balanced preference model to balance the demographic distribution with synthetic data. Experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces demographic bias while preserving semantic fidelity. We hope our findings underscore the need for more holistic interpretation and debiasing strategies of U-MLLMs in the future.
title On Fairness of Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for Image Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03429