Youngsik Yun

Zhixuan Liu, Youeun Shin, Beverley-Claire Okogwu et al.

It has been shown that accurate representation in media improves the well-being of the people who consume it. By contrast, inaccurate representations can negatively affect viewers and lead to harmful perceptions of other cultures. To achieve inclusive representation in generated images, we propose a culturally-aware priming approach for text-to-image synthesis using a small but culturally curated dataset that we collected, known here as Cross-Cultural Understanding Benchmark (CCUB) Dataset, to fight the bias prevalent in giant datasets. Our proposed approach is comprised of two fine-tuning techniques: (1) Adding visual context via fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image synthesis model, Stable Diffusion, on the CCUB text-image pairs, and (2) Adding semantic context via automated prompt engineering using the fine-tuned large language model, GPT-3, trained on our CCUB culturally-aware text data. CCUB dataset is curated and our approach is evaluated by people who have a personal relationship with that particular culture. Our experiments indicate that priming using both text and image is effective in improving the cultural relevance and decreasing the offensiveness of generated images while maintaining quality.

Youngsik Yun, Jihie Kim

Image Captioning generates descriptive sentences from images using Vision-Language Pre-trained models (VLPs) such as BLIP, which has improved greatly. However, current methods lack the generation of detailed descriptive captions for the cultural elements depicted in the images, such as the traditional clothing worn by people from Asian cultural groups. In this paper, we propose a new framework, Culturally-aware Image Captioning (CIC), that generates captions and describes cultural elements extracted from cultural visual elements in images representing cultures. Inspired by methods combining visual modality and Large Language Models (LLMs) through appropriate prompts, our framework (1) generates questions based on cultural categories from images, (2) extracts cultural visual elements from Visual Question Answering (VQA) using generated questions, and (3) generates culturally-aware captions using LLMs with the prompts. Our human evaluation conducted on 45 participants from 4 different cultural groups with a high understanding of the corresponding culture shows that our proposed framework generates more culturally descriptive captions when compared to the image captioning baseline based on VLPs. Resources can be found at https://shane3606.github.io/cic..

Zhixuan Liu, Peter Schaldenbrand, Beverley-Claire Okogwu et al.

Accurate representation in media is known to improve the well-being of the people who consume it. Generative image models trained on large web-crawled datasets such as LAION are known to produce images with harmful stereotypes and misrepresentations of cultures. We improve inclusive representation in generated images by (1) engaging with communities to collect a culturally representative dataset that we call the Cross-Cultural Understanding Benchmark (CCUB) and (2) proposing a novel Self-Contrastive Fine-Tuning (SCoFT) method that leverages the model's known biases to self-improve. SCoFT is designed to prevent overfitting on small datasets, encode only high-level information from the data, and shift the generated distribution away from misrepresentations encoded in a pretrained model. Our user study conducted on 51 participants from 5 different countries based on their self-selected national cultural affiliation shows that fine-tuning on CCUB consistently generates images with higher cultural relevance and fewer stereotypes when compared to the Stable Diffusion baseline, which is further improved with our SCoFT technique.