Adaptive Logit Adjustment for Debiasing Multimodal Language Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13807 Authors

Keywords: Large Multimodal Model, Fairness, Image-to-Text, Logit Adjustment

Abstract:

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have significantly advanced image-to-text generation tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering (VQA).
However, these models often exhibit biases, including attribute misalignment between the generated text and the input image, or the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes.
Existing debiasing techniques primarily focus on modifying representations at the encoder or decoder level, which can degrade model performance and may be susceptible to bias reintroduction from external sources. In this work, we propose **Adaptive Logit Adjustment (ALA) for Bias Alignment and Neutralization**, a post-hoc debiasing method that operates directly on logits during autoregressive text generation. Unlike prior approaches that modify internal representations, ALA selectively adjusts token probabilities to mitigate biases without distorting essential model outputs. Our approach leverages external classifiers to measure bias misalignment between image and text, applies gradient-based importance analysis to identify bias-inducing tokens, and dynamically refines token probabilities to reduce undesired biases.
We evaluate ALA on image captioning and various VQA tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating bias while maintaining contextual accuracy. Notably, our approach is applicable to various multimodal architectures in a model-agnostic manner, including VLMs and LMMs, across different tasks that involve autoregressive text generation. Our results show that logit-based debiasing offers a flexible and efficient alternative to existing encoder- and embedding-centric approaches, providing a more practical solution for building fairer multimodal AI systems.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 13807