D3G: Diverse Demographic Data Generation Increases Zero-Shot Image Classification Accuracy within Multimodal Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Hickmon, Javon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hickmon, Javon
author_facet Hickmon, Javon
contents Image classification is a task essential for machine perception to achieve human-level image understanding. Multimodal models such as CLIP have been able to perform well on this task by learning semantic similarities across vision and language; however, despite these advances, image classification is still a challenging task. Models with low capacity often suffer from underfitting and thus underperform on fine-grained image classification. Along with this, it is important to ensure high-quality data with rich cross-modal representations of each class, which is often difficult to generate. When datasets do not enforce balanced demographics, the predictions will be biased toward the more represented class, while others will be neglected. We focus on how these issues can lead to harmful bias for zero-shot image classification, and explore how to combat these issues in demographic bias. We propose Diverse Demographic Data Generation (D3G), a training-free, zero-shot method of boosting classification accuracy while reducing demographic bias in pre-trained multimodal models. With this method, we utilize CLIP as our base multimodal model and Stable Diffusion XL as our generative model. We demonstrate that providing diverse demographic data at inference time improves performance for these models, and explore the impact of individual demographics on the resulting accuracy metric.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_15747
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle D3G: Diverse Demographic Data Generation Increases Zero-Shot Image Classification Accuracy within Multimodal Models
Hickmon, Javon
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Image classification is a task essential for machine perception to achieve human-level image understanding. Multimodal models such as CLIP have been able to perform well on this task by learning semantic similarities across vision and language; however, despite these advances, image classification is still a challenging task. Models with low capacity often suffer from underfitting and thus underperform on fine-grained image classification. Along with this, it is important to ensure high-quality data with rich cross-modal representations of each class, which is often difficult to generate. When datasets do not enforce balanced demographics, the predictions will be biased toward the more represented class, while others will be neglected. We focus on how these issues can lead to harmful bias for zero-shot image classification, and explore how to combat these issues in demographic bias. We propose Diverse Demographic Data Generation (D3G), a training-free, zero-shot method of boosting classification accuracy while reducing demographic bias in pre-trained multimodal models. With this method, we utilize CLIP as our base multimodal model and Stable Diffusion XL as our generative model. We demonstrate that providing diverse demographic data at inference time improves performance for these models, and explore the impact of individual demographics on the resulting accuracy metric.
title D3G: Diverse Demographic Data Generation Increases Zero-Shot Image Classification Accuracy within Multimodal Models
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15747