Judging by Appearances? Auditing and Intervening Vision-Language Models for Bail Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Basu, Sagnik, Prakash, Shubham, Barge, Ashish Maruti, Jaiswal, Siddharth D, Dash, Abhisek, Ghosh, Saptarshi, Mukherjee, Animesh
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Basu, Sagnik
Prakash, Shubham
Barge, Ashish Maruti
Jaiswal, Siddharth D
Dash, Abhisek
Ghosh, Saptarshi
Mukherjee, Animesh
author_facet Basu, Sagnik
Prakash, Shubham
Barge, Ashish Maruti
Jaiswal, Siddharth D
Dash, Abhisek
Ghosh, Saptarshi
Mukherjee, Animesh
contents Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively used for legal judgment prediction tasks based on case reports and crime history. However, with a surge in the availability of large vision language models (VLMs), legal judgment prediction systems can now be made to leverage the images of the criminals in addition to the textual case reports/crime history. Applications built in this way could lead to inadvertent consequences and be used with malicious intent. In this work, we run an audit to investigate the efficiency of standalone VLMs in the bail decision prediction task. We observe that the performance is poor across multiple intersectional groups and models \textit{wrongly deny bail to deserving individuals with very high confidence}. We design different intervention algorithms by first including legal precedents through a RAG pipeline and then fine-tuning the VLMs using innovative schemes. We demonstrate that these interventions substantially improve the performance of bail prediction. Our work paves the way for the design of smarter interventions on VLMs in the future, before they can be deployed for real-world legal judgment prediction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00088
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Judging by Appearances? Auditing and Intervening Vision-Language Models for Bail Prediction
Basu, Sagnik
Prakash, Shubham
Barge, Ashish Maruti
Jaiswal, Siddharth D
Dash, Abhisek
Ghosh, Saptarshi
Mukherjee, Animesh
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively used for legal judgment prediction tasks based on case reports and crime history. However, with a surge in the availability of large vision language models (VLMs), legal judgment prediction systems can now be made to leverage the images of the criminals in addition to the textual case reports/crime history. Applications built in this way could lead to inadvertent consequences and be used with malicious intent. In this work, we run an audit to investigate the efficiency of standalone VLMs in the bail decision prediction task. We observe that the performance is poor across multiple intersectional groups and models \textit{wrongly deny bail to deserving individuals with very high confidence}. We design different intervention algorithms by first including legal precedents through a RAG pipeline and then fine-tuning the VLMs using innovative schemes. We demonstrate that these interventions substantially improve the performance of bail prediction. Our work paves the way for the design of smarter interventions on VLMs in the future, before they can be deployed for real-world legal judgment prediction.
title Judging by Appearances? Auditing and Intervening Vision-Language Models for Bail Prediction
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00088