ImageCaptioner$^2$: Image Captioner for Image Captioning Bias Amplification Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces $ImageCaptioner^2$, a new bias assessment metric for image captioning that considers visual signals and bias amplification, validated across multiple architectures and datasets with strong correlation to human judgment.

Contribution

The paper presents $ImageCaptioner^2$, a novel bias metric that incorporates visual context and measures bias amplification, improving over existing caption-only bias evaluation methods.

Findings

$ImageCaptioner^2$ outperforms LIC in human alignment by 80%.

The metric is validated on 11 architectures and 3 datasets.

It effectively measures bias amplification related to protected attributes.

Abstract

Most pre-trained learning systems are known to suffer from bias, which typically emerges from the data, the model, or both. Measuring and quantifying bias and its sources is a challenging task and has been extensively studied in image captioning. Despite the significant effort in this direction, we observed that existing metrics lack consistency in the inclusion of the visual signal. In this paper, we introduce a new bias assessment metric, dubbed $ImageCaptioner^2$, for image captioning. Instead of measuring the absolute bias in the model or the data, $ImageCaptioner^2$ pay more attention to the bias introduced by the model w.r.t the data bias, termed bias amplification. Unlike the existing methods, which only evaluate the image captioning algorithms based on the generated captions only, $ImageCaptioner^2$ incorporates the image while measuring the bias. In addition, we design a formulation for measuring the bias of generated captions as prompt-based image captioning instead of using language classifiers. Finally, we apply our $ImageCaptioner^2$ metric across 11 different image captioning architectures on three different datasets, i.e., MS-COCO caption dataset, Artemis V1, and Artemis V2, and on three different protected attributes, i.e., gender, race, and emotions. Consequently, we verify the effectiveness of our $ImageCaptioner^2$ metric by proposing AnonymousBench, which is a novel human evaluation paradigm for bias metrics. Our metric shows significant superiority over the recent bias metric; LIC, in terms of human alignment, where the correlation scores are 80% and 54% for our metric and LIC, respectively. The code is available at https://eslambakr.github.io/imagecaptioner2.github.io/.