Scaling Vision-Language Models Is Not Enough to Mitigate Bias

Ioannis Sarridis; Ioannis Kompatsiaris; Symeon Papadopoulos

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arXiv · 2607.28211

Scaling Vision-Language Models Is Not Enough to Mitigate Bias

Ioannis Sarridis·Ioannis Kompatsiaris·Symeon Papadopoulos

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Abstract

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are now foundational to multimodal systems, yet their robustness to spurious correlations remains poorly understood at scale. We present the first large-scale empirical study of 194 publicly available VLMs, including 16 model families, covering a wide range of model sizes, 24 training datasets, and three evaluation benchmarks, namely ImageNet (overall performance), CelebA (typical single-attribute bias), and UrbanCars (complex multi-attribute biases). Across these settings, the Spearman correlation between model scale and performance weakens as evaluation shifts from ImageNet ($\rho{=}0.68$) to single-attribute ($\rho{=}0.48$) and further to multi-attribute ($\rho{=}0.05$) bias benchmarks. In contrast, properties of the training data (size and quality) show more consistent relationships with worst-group accuracy across both bias benchmarks. Notably, curated datasets yield improvements of up to 25% over uncurated alternatives at a comparable scale. Finally, the effect of architectural choices (e.g., patch size, image resolution) is highly context-dependent, varying with the nature of the benchmark, including the type of bias and its spatial distribution within images.

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Ioannis Sarridis, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, Symeon Papadopoulos. 2026-07-30. Scaling Vision-Language Models Is Not Enough to Mitigate Bias. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28211

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