Debiasing Multimodal Large Language Models via Noise-Aware Preference Optimization

Zefeng Zhang, Hengzhu Tang, Jiawei Sheng, Zhenyu Zhang, Yiming Ren, Zhenyang Li, Dawei Yin, Duohe Ma, Tingwen Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025, pp. 9423-9433

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in various tasks, yet often struggle with modality bias, tending to rely heavily on a single modality or prior knowledge when generating responses. In this paper, we propose a debiased preference optimization dataset, RLAIF-V-Bias, and introduce a Noise-Aware Preference Optimization (NAPO) algorithm. Specifically, we first construct the dataset by introducing perturbations to reduce the informational content of certain modalities, prompting the model to overly rely on a specific modality when generating responses. To address the inevitable noise in automatically constructed data, we combine the noise-robust Mean Absolute Error (MAE) with the Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using a negative Box-Cox transformation and dynamically adjust the algorithm's noise robustness based on the evaluated noise levels in the data.Extensive experiments validate our approach, demonstrating not only its effectiveness in mitigating modality bias but also its significant role in minimizing hallucinations.