A Unified Debiasing Approach for Vision-Language Models across Modalities and Tasks

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled complex multimodal tasks by processing text and image data simultaneously, significantly enhancing the field of artificial intelligence. However, these models often exhibit biases that can skew outputs towards societal stereotypes, thus necessitating debiasing strategies. Existing debiasing methods focus narrowly on specific modalities or tasks, and require extensive retraining. To address these limitations, this paper introduces Selective Feature Imputation for Debiasing (SFID), a novel methodology that integrates feature pruning and low confidence imputation (LCI) to effectively reduce biases in VLMs. SFID is versatile, maintaining the semantic integrity of outputs and costly effective by eliminating the need for retraining. Our experimental results demonstrate SFID's effectiveness across various VLMs tasks including zero-shot classification, text-to-image retrieval, image captioning, and text-to-image generation, by significantly reducing gender biases without compromising performance. This approach not only enhances the fairness of VLMs applications but also preserves their efficiency and utility across diverse scenarios.

Revealing and Utilizing In-group Favoritism for Graph-based Collaborative Filtering

When it comes to a personalized item recommendation system, It is essential to extract users' preferences and purchasing patterns. Assuming that users in the real world form a cluster and there is common favoritism in each cluster, in this work, we introduce Co-Clustering Wrapper (CCW). We compute co-clusters of users and items with co-clustering algorithms and add CF subnetworks for each cluster to extract the in-group favoritism. Combining the features from the networks, we obtain rich and unified information about users. We experimented real world datasets considering two aspects: Finding the number of groups divided according to in-group preference, and measuring the quantity of improvement of the performance.