UFPR-PEs: A Brazilian Face Recognition Benchmark with Self-Declared Race/Color Labels

While face recognition systems are widely deployed, ensuring their demographic reliability and robustness under uncontrolled visual conditions remains a critical challenge. To bridge this gap, we present UFPR-PEs, a benchmark for face recognition bias evaluation using public videos of elected Brazilian politicians annotated with official self-declared race/color categories. The dataset adopts the Brazilian census taxonomy, including the parda category, which has no direct equivalent in the U.S.- or Europe-centric schemas commonly used in prior benchmarks. Our benchmark is built from compressed public video and preserves difficult samples so that performance can be analyzed under realistic conditions. We describe the construction pipeline, report dataset statistics, and evaluate face recognition performance across verification and (closed- and open-set) identification settings, including subgroup analysis by race/color and difficulty level. The results show that recognition performance varies substantially with image quality, and that subgroup gaps must be interpreted jointly with visual difficulty rather than in isolation. Overall, UFPR-PEs provides a reproducible and demographically grounded setting for studying face recognition bias under challenging public video conditions.

ContextBias: Controlled Evaluation of Bias Persistence Under Context Shift in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image models learn associations between concepts - in the case of this paper, people's professions, which we refer to as roles - and visual attributes. These associations can underpin many observed forms of stereotypical bias. A key open question in this area is whether these associations are stable or change when visual representations of people in professional roles are placed in different prompted contexts. We introduce ContextBias, a controlled evaluation framework, and ContextBench, a benchmark spanning 92 roles and 1,656 semantically controlled prompts, designed to isolate the effect of contextual variation on role-linked visual representations. Evaluating four state-of-the-art models on 66,240 generated images, we find that placing a role in a semantically unrelated context does not suppress role-linked attributes; instead, cross-role attribute concentration increases (pooled BI $+0.047$). Demographic cues, characteristic garments, and role-specific tools remain highly prevalent across context-free, related, and unrelated conditions, and are robust to semantic prompt reformulation. Scene composition and camera framing show the greatest context-sensitivity. These findings reveal a form of stereotypical persistence that remains largely invisible to context-free evaluations, highlighting the need for controlled contextual variation in bias benchmarking. Code and dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/shaghayegh/ContextBias , https://github.com/Sina-Emami/ContextBias

Human versus Computer Vision

Computer vision saliency models predict where people will look, one map per image, and a billion-dollar predicted-attention industry sells those maps in place of measuring real viewers. I test the leading models from the audience side, against 11.4 million webcam gaze points from 3,023 US adults recruited to national quotas, viewing circulating news photographs. I show that an untrained central marker outperforms every trained network, because the content the networks add on top of the center falls where these audiences never look. What accuracy remains is systematically biased, favoring younger, White, and moderate viewers over older, Black, and ideologically extreme ones. I propose a way forward and build on what a group's own gaze reveals about whether a model can learn that group at all, and I apply it across every demographic axis this sample supports. Ultimately, I show how systems that decide what people see can learn to see everyone, and this study supplies the standard by which such a claim should be judged.

Investigating Social Bias in Narrative Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generation models are increasingly embedded in applications such as media content creation and education, raising concerns about how their outputs may reproduce social biases. Prior work has shown that T2I models exhibit social biases, yet existing evaluations largely focus on a photo generation task. As a result, it remains unclear whether and how such biases manifest in more narrative visual formats, such as storyboards and comics, where characters and events are presented across multiple panels. In this work, we compare bias expression across photo, storyboard, and comic generation in six T2I models by adapting BBG, a text-based bias evaluation framework, to image generation. Our results show that proprietary models generate 25.9% biased outputs in photo generation on average, with biased outputs increasing by 9.6pp in storyboard generation and 18.2pp in comic generation. We also find that photos mainly encode biases through subtle visual cues, while storyboards and comics reveal them more explicitly through event sequencing, character positioning, narrative resolution, and textual elements. These findings show that biases that remain less visible in photo generation may surface in narrative visual formats, highlighting the importance of evaluating T2I systems with diverse visual formats beyond photo generation.

How Do Diffusion Classifiers Decide? A Bias-Centric Evaluation

Diffusion models have recently been repurposed for zero-shot classification, giving rise to diffusion classifiers that identify the best-matching text prompt by minimizing the noise-prediction error. Despite their growing adoption, how these models make classification decisions remains poorly understood. We introduce ASOB-Bench, a bias evaluation for diffusion classifiers along three dimensions: Attribute binding, Size-Order bias, and Background dependency. These dimensions serve not as an exhaustive taxonomy but as targeted probes of how the text-conditioned reconstruction-error score reaches a decision. Such a perspective is well studied for discriminative vision-language models, yet remains overlooked for diffusion classifiers. Extending an existing framework with five new attribute categories on newly constructed datasets, we find diffusion classifiers are less prone to attribute misbinding than an OpenCLIP baseline; on the established ComCo benchmark they are substantially more susceptible to size-order shortcuts; and on ImageNet-B they suffer far larger accuracy drops, revealing heavy reliance on background over foreground cues. Reconstruction-error heatmaps and U-Net cross-attention visualizations expose the mechanism behind each bias. Because diffusion classifiers share the same denoiser as text-to-image models, these single-pass diagnostics also point toward analogous failure modes in generation. Overall, diffusion classifiers exhibit a distinct bias profile from vision-language models, offering guidance for building more robust diffusion-based models.

WIDER-FAIR: An Annotated Version of the WIDER-FACE Dataset for Fairness Evaluation

The deployment of face detection models in real-world applications raises important fairness concerns, as these systems may showcase performance disparities across demographic groups. A key obstacle to studying and mitigating such biases is the lack of face detection datasets with sensitive feature annotations. To address this gap, we introduce WIDER-FAIR, a new dataset built on the widely used WIDER-FACE benchmark, manually annotated with the perceived ethnicity and sex of each face. The dataset contains 16,256 images annotated across four ethnic groups: Asian, Black, Indian, and White, and two sex categories. We assess the quality and coherence of the annotations using face embeddings, a K-Nearest Neighbors classifier, and a t-SNE visualization, all of which support the consistency of the labeling process. As a demonstration of the dataset's potential, we train a YOLOv5 model and perform ablation studies on each sensitive feature. Among other findings, our experiments show that detection performance is notably lower for faces of Black individuals, and that excluding this group from training increases fairness disparity more than excluding any other ethnic group. These observations illustrate the value of demographically annotated datasets for understanding and evaluating bias in face detection models.