Papers for

multilingual software teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Text to image systems silently add cultural bias through prompt changes

Prompt Revision as a Source of Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Systems

Abstract: Commercial text-to-image systems silently revise user prompts before generating images, a step users typically cannot disable or even see. Yet, existing audits of cultural bias examine only the final images and treat generation as a single pipeline, so they cannot tell where the bias originates. We introduce WORLDVIEW, a multilingual benchmark of 8,960 prompts across 15 languages and 31 language-context pairings. Using it, we audit the revision layer in three systems (DALL-E-3, Imagen-4, GPT-Image-1.5) through a three-step analysis of how heavily it marks each cultural context, whether it flattens that context into a narrow vocabulary, and whether that vocabulary is stereotypical. Relative to a no-context English baseline, the US is the least-marked context, while non-Western and non-Anglophone contexts are marked far more heavily, flattened into narrow vocabularies applied across topically diverse prompts, and reduced to recognizable cultural stereotypes. Comparing images from original versus revised prompts on models without a revision layer, we identify the layer itself as a previously undocumented, causal source of this stereotyping. To locate cultural bias, and fix it, we must audit the system as deployed, not the model alone.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Text-to-image systems change users’ prompts behind the scenes, and this can add cultural bias that makes images stereotype certain cultures. The authors studied three systems and found that prompts about non-Western or non-English-speaking cultures were altered more heavily and turned into narrow, stereotyped vocabularies. They traced this bias specifically to the hidden prompt revision step, showing it causes more stereotyping in generated images. This means to understand and fix bias, we need to look at the whole system as people actually use it, not just at the image generation model.
Open 2609.11532v1