arXiv subjects

Huichan Seo

Publications and source records attributed to Huichan Seo.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Toward Trustworthy Portrait Editing: Evaluation of Demographic Misrepresentation in I2I Models

Instruction-guided image-to-image (I2I) editors are increasingly used in consumer and professional visual workflows, where trustworthiness depends not only on prompt compliance but also on equitable preservation of identity-relevant attributes. We formalize two failure modes: Soft Erasure, where requested edits are weakly realized or silently suppressed, and Stereotype Replacement, where edits introduce unrequested, stereotype-consistent demographic attributes. Using a controlled benchmark of 5,040 edited portraits, we evaluate these failures across three recent open-weight editors with vision-language model scoring and human evaluation. Our results show that identity-preservation failures are pervasive and demographically uneven. In particular, 62--71% of outputs exhibit skin lightening, with Indian and Black source portraits affected at 72--75%, compared with 44% for White source portraits, indicating output-level drift toward lighter or more White-presenting appearances when identity constraints are underspecified. In a mitigation case study, prompt-level appearance constraints reduce race-change scores for non-White source portraits by up to 1.48 points, while leaving White source portraits largely unchanged, without modifying model weights. These findings show that identity preservation is not a uniform property of I2I portrait editing systems, but an unevenly distributed trustworthiness failure with direct social consequences. At deployment scale, such silent distortions can shape AI-mediated self-representation and reinforce representational disparities. We introduce a controlled audit protocol for fairness-aware evaluation and governance of generative editing systems. Project page: https://seochan99.github.io/i2i-demographic-bias

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Before We Trust Them: Decision-Making Failures in Navigation of Foundation Models

High success rates on navigation-related tasks do not necessarily translate into reliable decision making by foundation models. To examine this gap, we evaluate current models on six diagnostic tasks spanning three settings: reasoning under complete spatial information, reasoning under incomplete spatial information, and reasoning under safety-relevant information. Our results show that the current metrics may not capture critical limitations of the models and indicate good performance, underscoring the need for failure-focused analysis to understand model limitations and guide future progress. In a path-planning setting with unknown cells, GPT-5 achieved a high success rate of 93%; Yet, the failed cases exhibit fundamental limitations of the models, e.g., the lack of structural spatial understanding essential for navigation. We also find that newer models are not always more reliable than their predecessors on this end. In reasoning under safety-relevant information, Gemini-2.5 Flash achieved only 67% on the challenging emergency-evacuation task, underperforming Gemini-2.0 Flash, which reached 100% under the same condition. Across all evaluations, models exhibited structural collapse, hallucinated reasoning, constraint violations, and unsafe decisions. These findings show that foundation models still exhibit substantial failures in navigation-related decision making and require fine-grained evaluation before they can be trusted.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Exposing Blindspots: Cultural Bias Evaluation in Generative Image Models

Generative image models produce striking visuals yet often misrepresent culture. Prior work has examined cultural bias mainly in text-to-image (T2I) systems, leaving image-to-image (I2I) editors underexplored. We bridge this gap with a unified evaluation across six countries, an 8-category/36-subcategory schema, and era-aware prompts, auditing both T2I generation and I2I editing under a standardized protocol that yields comparable diagnostics. Using open models with fixed settings, we derive cross-country, cross-era, and cross-category evaluations. Our framework combines standard automatic metrics, a culture-aware retrieval-augmented VQA, and expert human judgments collected from native reviewers. To enable reproducibility, we release the complete image corpus, prompts, and configurations. Our study reveals three findings: (1) under country-agnostic prompts, models default to Global-North, modern-leaning depictions that flatten cross-country distinctions; (2) iterative I2I editing erodes cultural fidelity even when conventional metrics remain flat or improve; and (3) I2I models apply superficial cues (palette shifts, generic props) rather than era-consistent, context-aware changes, often retaining source identity for Global-South targets. These results highlight that culture-sensitive edits remain unreliable in current systems. By releasing standardized data, prompts, and human evaluation protocols, we provide a reproducible, culture-centered benchmark for diagnosing and tracking cultural bias in generative image models. Project page: https://seochan99.github.io/ECB

cs.CV↗