Uplifting Lower-Income Data: Strategies for Socioeconomic Perspective Shifts in Large Multi-modal Models

Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated that the unequal representation of cultures and socioeconomic groups in training data leads to biased Large Multi-modal (LMM) models. To improve LMM model performance on underrepresented data, we propose and evaluate several prompting strategies using non-English, geographic, and socioeconomic attributes. We show that these geographic and socioeconomic integrated prompts favor retrieving topic appearances commonly found in data from low-income households across different countries leading to improved LMM model performance on lower-income data. Our analyses identify and highlight contexts where these strategies yield the most improvements.