Building Trustworthy Multimodal AI: A Review of Fairness, Transparency, and Ethics in Vision-Language Tasks

Objective: This review explores the trustworthiness of multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) systems, specifically focusing on vision-language tasks. It addresses critical challenges related to fairness, transparency, and ethical implications in these systems, providing a comparative analysis of key tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), image captioning, and visual dialogue. Background: Multimodal models, particularly vision-language models, enhance artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities by integrating visual and textual data, mimicking human learning processes. Despite significant advancements, the trustworthiness of these models remains a crucial concern, particularly as AI systems increasingly confront issues regarding fairness, transparency, and ethics. Methods: This review examines research conducted from 2017 to 2024 focusing on forenamed core vision-language tasks. It employs a comparative approach to analyze these tasks through the lens of trustworthiness, underlining fairness, explainability, and ethics. This study synthesizes findings from recent literature to identify trends, challenges, and state-of-the-art solutions. Results: Several key findings were highlighted. Transparency: Explainability of vision language tasks is important for user trust. Techniques, such as attention maps and gradient-based methods, have successfully addressed this issue. Fairness: Bias mitigation in VQA and visual dialogue systems is essential for ensuring unbiased outcomes across diverse demographic groups. Ethical Implications: Addressing biases in multilingual models and ensuring ethical data handling is critical for the responsible deployment of vision-language systems. Conclusion: This study underscores the importance of integrating fairness, transparency, and ethical considerations in developing vision-language models within a unified framework.