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South Asian biases in language and vision models

Biases in artificial intelligence models have been studied predominantly through Western lenses, overlooking South Asia’s unique contexts of caste, religion, colourism and representation. This Comment highlights region-specific biases in language and vision models and calls for fairness frameworks grounded in South Asian realities.

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Fig. 1: A taxonomy of South Asian biases in language and vision models.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under its MOE Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOE-T2EP20123-0005: ‘Neurosymbolic AI for Commonsense-based Question Answering in Multiple Domains’), and by the RIE2025 Industry Alignment Fund – Industry Collaboration Projects (I2301E0026: ‘Generative AI’), administered by A*STAR, as well as supported by Alibaba Group and NTU Singapore.

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Correspondence to Mohammad Nadeem.

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Nadeem, M., Sohail, S.S., Cambria, E. et al. South Asian biases in language and vision models. Nat Mach Intell 7, 1775–1777 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-025-01144-1

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