@inproceedings{han-etal-2026-selective,
title = "Selective Test-Time Debiasing for {CLIP} via Reward Gating",
author = "Han, Jaeho and
Yang, Jisoo and
Woo, Hyeondong and
Jeon, Mingyu and
Yoon, Sunjae and
Kim, Junyeong",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1320/",
pages = "28617--28631",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, but often perpetuate social stereotypes in person-centric queries, yielding skewed demographic distributions. Current debiasing methods apply uniform bias corrections across all input queries regardless of their bias sensitivity, creating a fundamental fairness{--}utility trade-off. Strong debiasing distorts semantically meaningful information in bias-insensitive queries, while weak debiasing fails to mitigate stereotypes in bias-sensitive ones. This one-size-fits-all approach hampers simultaneously achieving high utility on bias-insensitive queries and fairness on bias-sensitive queries. We introduce Reward-Gated Test-Time Adaptation (RG-TTA), a reinforcement learning-based test-time adaptation framework that selectively applies debiasing based on input sensitivity. RG-TTA adaptively triggers fairness regularization based on the bias sensitivity of each input during test-time policy adaptation, while focusing exclusively on optimizing cross-modal alignment for bias-insensitive inputs. Experiments on fairness benchmarks (e.g., FairFace, UTKFace) demonstrate substantial bias reduction while simultaneously improving zero-shot utility, resolving the trade-off of uniform debiasing."
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<abstract>Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, but often perpetuate social stereotypes in person-centric queries, yielding skewed demographic distributions. Current debiasing methods apply uniform bias corrections across all input queries regardless of their bias sensitivity, creating a fundamental fairness–utility trade-off. Strong debiasing distorts semantically meaningful information in bias-insensitive queries, while weak debiasing fails to mitigate stereotypes in bias-sensitive ones. This one-size-fits-all approach hampers simultaneously achieving high utility on bias-insensitive queries and fairness on bias-sensitive queries. We introduce Reward-Gated Test-Time Adaptation (RG-TTA), a reinforcement learning-based test-time adaptation framework that selectively applies debiasing based on input sensitivity. RG-TTA adaptively triggers fairness regularization based on the bias sensitivity of each input during test-time policy adaptation, while focusing exclusively on optimizing cross-modal alignment for bias-insensitive inputs. Experiments on fairness benchmarks (e.g., FairFace, UTKFace) demonstrate substantial bias reduction while simultaneously improving zero-shot utility, resolving the trade-off of uniform debiasing.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Selective Test-Time Debiasing for CLIP via Reward Gating
%A Han, Jaeho
%A Yang, Jisoo
%A Woo, Hyeondong
%A Jeon, Mingyu
%A Yoon, Sunjae
%A Kim, Junyeong
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F han-etal-2026-selective
%X Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, but often perpetuate social stereotypes in person-centric queries, yielding skewed demographic distributions. Current debiasing methods apply uniform bias corrections across all input queries regardless of their bias sensitivity, creating a fundamental fairness–utility trade-off. Strong debiasing distorts semantically meaningful information in bias-insensitive queries, while weak debiasing fails to mitigate stereotypes in bias-sensitive ones. This one-size-fits-all approach hampers simultaneously achieving high utility on bias-insensitive queries and fairness on bias-sensitive queries. We introduce Reward-Gated Test-Time Adaptation (RG-TTA), a reinforcement learning-based test-time adaptation framework that selectively applies debiasing based on input sensitivity. RG-TTA adaptively triggers fairness regularization based on the bias sensitivity of each input during test-time policy adaptation, while focusing exclusively on optimizing cross-modal alignment for bias-insensitive inputs. Experiments on fairness benchmarks (e.g., FairFace, UTKFace) demonstrate substantial bias reduction while simultaneously improving zero-shot utility, resolving the trade-off of uniform debiasing.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1320/
%P 28617-28631
Markdown (Informal)
[Selective Test-Time Debiasing for CLIP via Reward Gating](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1320/) (Han et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Jaeho Han, Jisoo Yang, Hyeondong Woo, Mingyu Jeon, Sunjae Yoon, and Junyeong Kim. 2026. Selective Test-Time Debiasing for CLIP via Reward Gating. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 28617–28631, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.