{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/understanding-and-evaluating-racial-biases-in","title":"Understanding and Evaluating Racial Biases in Image Captioning","arxiv_id":"2106.08503","date":"2021-06-16","proceeding":"ICCV 2021 10","authors":["Dora Zhao","Angelina Wang","Olga Russakovsky"],"abstract":"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 .","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08503v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.08503v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"understanding-and-evaluating-racial-biases-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/princetonvisualai/imagecaptioning-bias","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"image-captioning","task_name":"Image Captioning"},{"task_slug":"visual-reasoning","task_name":"Visual Reasoning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2106.08503","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.08503","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2106.08503"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/princetonvisualai/imagecaptioning-bias","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"e3bd25e079300d63","entry":"compute_average","repo":"princetonvisualai/imagecaptioning-bias","repo_kind":"official","path":"code/evaluate_captions.py","file_url":"https://github.com/princetonvisualai/imagecaptioning-bias/blob/HEAD/code/evaluate_captions.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e3bd25e079300d63"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}