Image captioning is an important task for benchmarking visual reasoning and for enabling accessibility for people with vision impairments. However, as in many machine learning settings, social biases can influence image captioning in undesirable ways. In this work, we study bias propagation pathways within image captioning, focusing specifically on the COCO dataset. Prior work has analyzed gender bias in captions using automatically-derived gender labels; here we examine racial and intersectional biases using manual annotations. Our first contribution is in annotating the perceived gender and skin color of 28,315 of the depicted people after obtaining IRB approval. Using these annotations, we compare racial biases present in both manual and automatically-generated image captions. We demonstrate differences in caption performance, sentiment, and word choice between images of lighter versus darker-skinned people. Further, we find the magnitude of these differences to be greater in modern captioning systems compared to older ones, thus leading to concerns that without proper consideration and mitigation these differences will only become increasingly prevalent. Code and data is available at https://princetonvisualai.github.io/imagecaptioning-bias .

本研究分析了图像描述中的社会偏见以及种族偏见，具体关注于COCO数据集中的感知性别和肤色标注等因素。结果表明图像描述模型对于不同肤色的人物的表述、情感和词汇选择存在差异，并发现这种差异在现代模型中更加明显。

图像字幕中的种族偏见理解和评估