Where Do Images Come From? Analyzing Captions to Geographically Profile Datasets

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Basu, Abhipsa, Bahl, Yugam, Bhagat, Kirti, Seshadri, Preethi, Babu, R. Venkatesh, Pruthi, Danish
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Basu, Abhipsa
Bahl, Yugam
Bhagat, Kirti
Seshadri, Preethi
Babu, R. Venkatesh
Pruthi, Danish
author_facet Basu, Abhipsa
Bahl, Yugam
Bhagat, Kirti
Seshadri, Preethi
Babu, R. Venkatesh
Pruthi, Danish
contents Recent studies show that text-to-image models often fail to generate geographically representative images, raising concerns about the representativeness of their training data and motivating the question: which parts of the world do these training examples come from? We geographically profile large-scale multimodal datasets by mapping image-caption pairs to countries based on location information extracted from captions using LLMs. Studying English captions from three widely used datasets (Re-LAION, DataComp1B, and Conceptual Captions) across $20$ common entities (e.g., house, flag), we find that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada account for $48.0\%$ of samples, while South American and African countries are severely under-represented with only $1.8\%$ and $3.8\%$ of images, respectively. We observe a strong correlation between a country's GDP and its representation in the data ($ρ= 0.82$). Examining non-English subsets for $4$ languages from the Re-LAION dataset, we find that representation skews heavily toward countries where these languages are predominantly spoken. Additionally, we find that higher representation does not necessarily translate to greater visual or semantic diversity. Finally, analyzing country-specific images generated by Stable Diffusion v1.3 trained on Re-LAION, we show that while generations appear realistic, they are severely limited in their coverage compared to real-world images.
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publishDate 2026
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spellingShingle Where Do Images Come From? Analyzing Captions to Geographically Profile Datasets
Basu, Abhipsa
Bahl, Yugam
Bhagat, Kirti
Seshadri, Preethi
Babu, R. Venkatesh
Pruthi, Danish
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent studies show that text-to-image models often fail to generate geographically representative images, raising concerns about the representativeness of their training data and motivating the question: which parts of the world do these training examples come from? We geographically profile large-scale multimodal datasets by mapping image-caption pairs to countries based on location information extracted from captions using LLMs. Studying English captions from three widely used datasets (Re-LAION, DataComp1B, and Conceptual Captions) across $20$ common entities (e.g., house, flag), we find that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada account for $48.0\%$ of samples, while South American and African countries are severely under-represented with only $1.8\%$ and $3.8\%$ of images, respectively. We observe a strong correlation between a country's GDP and its representation in the data ($ρ= 0.82$). Examining non-English subsets for $4$ languages from the Re-LAION dataset, we find that representation skews heavily toward countries where these languages are predominantly spoken. Additionally, we find that higher representation does not necessarily translate to greater visual or semantic diversity. Finally, analyzing country-specific images generated by Stable Diffusion v1.3 trained on Re-LAION, we show that while generations appear realistic, they are severely limited in their coverage compared to real-world images.
title Where Do Images Come From? Analyzing Captions to Geographically Profile Datasets
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09775