StylisticBias:少数视觉线索主导MLLM社会偏见
阅读原文· arxiv.orgStylisticBias 是一个用于评估多模态大语言模型(MLLM)属性级社会偏见的可控基准。研究团队生成500张逼真基础人脸,每张创建约50个单属性变体,共约25K图像,通过固定身份、逐次改变单一视觉属性来测量特定线索如何影响模型判断。在6个MLLM、25个二元社会判断场景中,年龄和体型主导身份层面效应,时尚风格等视觉线索引发最大属性层面偏移;约15个属性解释了近80%的总变异。模型在与社会经济和外貌语义对齐的判断中敏感性最强。StylisticBias基准及代码、数据集已开源。
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in personally and societally consequential settings, yet the visual cues that shape how these models judge people remain poorly understood. Prior work often compares different (groups of) individuals, making it difficult to separate appearance effects from identity differences. We introduce StylisticBias, a controlled benchmark for evaluating attribute-level social bias in MLLMs. We generate 500 photorealistic base faces and create about 50 single-attribute variations per face, producing about 25K images. This design keeps identity fixed and changes one visual attribute at a time. It lets us measure how specific cues shift model judgments. We evaluate six MLLMs across 25 binary social judgment scenarios. We find that age and body type dominate identity-level effects, while fashion style and other visual cues drive the largest attribute-level shifts. We further find that about 15 attributes account for nearly 80\% of the total variation, showing that bias is concentrated in a small set of visual cues. Sensitivity is strongest in judgments that are semantically aligned with appearance, especially socioeconomic and style-related judgments. We release StylisticBias as a benchmark for fine-grained bias evaluation in multimodal models. Code and dataset: https://github.com/timo-cavelius/StylisticBias and https://hf.co/datasets/shaghayegh/stylistic-bias-dataset.