From Preferences to Prejudice: The Role of Alignment Tuning in Shaping Social Bias in Video Diffusion Models
This addresses the issue of unfair and socially irresponsible video generation for users and developers, highlighting a need for bias-aware evaluation and mitigation, though it is incremental in building on existing bias analysis methods.
The study tackled the problem of social bias amplification in video diffusion models due to alignment tuning with human preferences, finding that such tuning strengthens representational biases and makes them temporally stable, producing smoother yet more stereotyped portrayals.
Recent advances in video diffusion models have significantly enhanced text-to-video generation, particularly through alignment tuning using reward models trained on human preferences. While these methods improve visual quality, they can unintentionally encode and amplify social biases. To systematically trace how such biases evolve throughout the alignment pipeline, we introduce VideoBiasEval, a comprehensive diagnostic framework for evaluating social representation in video generation. Grounded in established social bias taxonomies, VideoBiasEval employs an event-based prompting strategy to disentangle semantic content (actions and contexts) from actor attributes (gender and ethnicity). It further introduces multi-granular metrics to evaluate (1) overall ethnicity bias, (2) gender bias conditioned on ethnicity, (3) distributional shifts in social attributes across model variants, and (4) the temporal persistence of bias within videos. Using this framework, we conduct the first end-to-end analysis connecting biases in human preference datasets, their amplification in reward models, and their propagation through alignment-tuned video diffusion models. Our results reveal that alignment tuning not only strengthens representational biases but also makes them temporally stable, producing smoother yet more stereotyped portrayals. These findings highlight the need for bias-aware evaluation and mitigation throughout the alignment process to ensure fair and socially responsible video generation.