CIDER: A Causal Cure for Brand-Obsessed Text-to-Image Models

Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit a significant yet under-explored "brand bias", a tendency to generate contents featuring dominant commercial brands from generic prompts, posing ethical and legal risks. We propose CIDER, a novel, model-agnostic framework to mitigate bias at inference-time through prompt refinement to avoid costly retraining. CIDER uses a lightweight detector to identify branded content and a Vision-LLM (VLM) to generate stylistically divergent alternatives. We introduce the Brand Neutrality Score (BNS) to quantify this issue and perform extensive experiments on leading T2I models. Results show CIDER significantly reduces both explicit and implicit biases while maintaining image quality and aesthetic appeal. Our work offers a practical solution for more original and equitable content, contributing to the development of trustworthy generative AI.