AAAI 2026

January 23, 2026

Singapore, Singapore

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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed across downstream tasks, yet their training data often encode social biases that surface in outputs. Unlike humans, who interpret images through contextual and social cues, VLMs process them through statistical associations, often leading to reasoning that diverges from human reasoning. By analyzing how a VLM reasons, we can understand how inherent biases are perpetuated and can adversely affect downstream performance. To examine this gap, we systematically analyze social biases in five open-source VLMs for an occupation prediction task, on the FairFace dataset. Across 32 occupations and three different prompting styles, we elicit both predictions and reasoning. Our findings show that the biased reasoning patterns systematically underlie intersectional disparities, highlighting the need to align VLM reasoning with human values before downstream deployment.

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Federated Cross-Modal Style-Aware Prompt Generation (Student Abstract)

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Sunny Gupta and 3 other authors

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