{"ID":2886207,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03199","arxiv_id":"2508.03199","title":"Beyond Content: How Grammatical Gender Shapes Visual Representation in Text-to-Image Models","abstract":"Research on bias in Text-to-Image (T2I) models has primarily focused on demographic representation and stereotypical attributes, overlooking a fundamental question: how does grammatical gender influence visual representation across languages? We introduce a cross-linguistic benchmark examining words where grammatical gender contradicts stereotypical gender associations (e.g., ``une sentinelle'' - grammatically feminine in French but referring to the stereotypically masculine concept ``guard''). Our dataset spans five gendered languages (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian) and two gender-neutral control languages (English, Chinese), comprising 800 unique prompts that generated 28,800 images across three state-of-the-art T2I models. Our analysis reveals that grammatical gender dramatically influences image generation: masculine grammatical markers increase male representation to 73% on average (compared to 22% with gender-neutral English), while feminine grammatical markers increase female representation to 38% (compared to 28% in English). These effects vary systematically by language resource availability and model architecture, with high-resource languages showing stronger effects. Our findings establish that language structure itself, not just content, shapes AI-generated visual outputs, introducing a new dimension for understanding bias and fairness in multilingual, multimodal systems.","short_abstract":"Research on bias in Text-to-Image (T2I) models has primarily focused on demographic representation and stereotypical attributes, overlooking a fundamental question: how does grammatical gender influence visual representation across languages? We introduce a cross-linguistic benchmark examining words where grammatical g...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03199","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03199v4","authors":"[\"Muhammed Saeed\",\"Shaina Raza\",\"Ashmal Vayani\",\"Muhammad Abdul-Mageed\",\"Ali Emami\",\"Shady Shehata\"]","published":"2025-08-05T08:13:07Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}