From Individuals to Interactions: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Multimodal Large Language Models from the Lens of Social Relationship

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Xu, Yue, Wang, Wenjie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911041037795328
author Xu, Yue
Wang, Wenjie
author_facet Xu, Yue
Wang, Wenjie
contents Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across tasks involving both visual and textual modalities. However, growing concerns remain about their potential to encode and amplify gender bias, particularly in socially sensitive applications. Existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate bias in isolated scenarios, overlooking how bias may emerge subtly through interpersonal interactions. We fill this gap by going beyond single-entity evaluation and instead focusing on a deeper examination of relational and contextual gender bias in dual-individual interactions. We introduce Genres, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate gender bias in MLLMs through the lens of social relationships in generated narratives. Genres assesses gender bias through a dual-character profile and narrative generation task that captures rich interpersonal dynamics and supports a fine-grained bias evaluation suite across multiple dimensions. Experiments on both open- and closed-source MLLMs reveal persistent, context-sensitive gender biases that are not evident in single-character settings. Our findings underscore the importance of relationship-aware benchmarks for diagnosing subtle, interaction-driven gender bias in MLLMs and provide actionable insights for future bias mitigation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23101
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Individuals to Interactions: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Multimodal Large Language Models from the Lens of Social Relationship
Xu, Yue
Wang, Wenjie
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across tasks involving both visual and textual modalities. However, growing concerns remain about their potential to encode and amplify gender bias, particularly in socially sensitive applications. Existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate bias in isolated scenarios, overlooking how bias may emerge subtly through interpersonal interactions. We fill this gap by going beyond single-entity evaluation and instead focusing on a deeper examination of relational and contextual gender bias in dual-individual interactions. We introduce Genres, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate gender bias in MLLMs through the lens of social relationships in generated narratives. Genres assesses gender bias through a dual-character profile and narrative generation task that captures rich interpersonal dynamics and supports a fine-grained bias evaluation suite across multiple dimensions. Experiments on both open- and closed-source MLLMs reveal persistent, context-sensitive gender biases that are not evident in single-character settings. Our findings underscore the importance of relationship-aware benchmarks for diagnosing subtle, interaction-driven gender bias in MLLMs and provide actionable insights for future bias mitigation.
title From Individuals to Interactions: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Multimodal Large Language Models from the Lens of Social Relationship
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23101