Examining Gender and Racial Bias in Large Vision–Language Models Using a Novel Dataset of Parallel Images
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following on recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and subsequent chat models, a new wave of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has emerged.Such models can incorporate images as input in addition to text, and perform tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, story generation, etc.Here, we examine potential gender and racial biases in such systems, based on the perceived characteristics of the people in the input images.To accomplish this, we present a new dataset PAIRS (PArallel Images for eveRyday Scenarios).The PAIRS dataset contains sets of AI-generated images of people, such that the images are highly similar in terms of background and visual content, but differ along the dimensions of gender (man, woman) and race (Black, white).By querying the LVLMs with such images, we observe significant differences in the responses according to the perceived gender or race of the person depicted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".