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FairImagen: Post-Processing for Bias Mitigation in Text-to-Image Models

Authors: Zihao Fu, Ryan Brown, Shun Shao, Kai Rawal, Eoin Delaney, Chris Russell

Published: 2025-10-24

arXiv ID: 2510.21363v1

Added to Library: 2025-11-14 23:07 UTC

📄 Abstract

Text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality and diverse images from natural language prompts. However, recent studies reveal that these models often replicate and amplify societal biases, particularly along demographic attributes like gender and race. In this paper, we introduce FairImagen (https://github.com/fuzihaofzh/FairImagen), a post-hoc debiasing framework that operates on prompt embeddings to mitigate such biases without retraining or modifying the underlying diffusion model. Our method integrates Fair Principal Component Analysis to project CLIP-based input embeddings into a subspace that minimizes group-specific information while preserving semantic content. We further enhance debiasing effectiveness through empirical noise injection and propose a unified cross-demographic projection method that enables simultaneous debiasing across multiple demographic attributes. Extensive experiments across gender, race, and intersectional settings demonstrate that FairImagen significantly improves fairness with a moderate trade-off in image quality and prompt fidelity. Our framework outperforms existing post-hoc methods and offers a simple, scalable, and model-agnostic solution for equitable text-to-image generation.

🔍 Key Points

  • Agent Skills are a newly introduced framework that allows agents to dynamically utilize knowledge based on markdown files, which presents a risk for prompt injections.
  • The authors demonstrate how malicious instructions can be hidden within Agent Skills to exfiltrate sensitive data, indicating a significant security vulnerability in such frameworks.
  • A key finding is the ability to bypass system-level guardrails by exploiting benign actions, which can be dangerous if users select options that allow actions without further prompts.
  • Experiments revealed that malicious scripts can be executed without user confirmation if the 'Don't ask again' feature is enabled, showcasing an exploitation pathway for attackers.
  • The paper emphasizes the importance of more robust defenses and alerts users against third-party Agent Skills that are not vetted for security.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is relevant as it exposes significant security vulnerabilities in the Agent Skills framework for LLMs, a critical aspect of ongoing developments in AI. By highlighting the ease with which malicious actions can be implemented and the potential consequences of such vulnerabilities, the paper serves as a call for improved security measures and oversight in AI applications that utilize similar architectures.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

The paper would be of interest to AI security researchers as it uncovers a novel attack vector related to prompt injections, particularly in the context of continually learning models. The findings prompt further investigation into the security implications of dynamic knowledge integration in LLMs and underline the necessity for improved safeguarding mechanisms against even simple injections, which can have far-reaching impacts in practice.

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