arXiv AI

The Anatomy of Socio-Demographics in Pluralistic Offensiveness Modeling: When and Where It Helps, and the Role of Reasoning

The study investigates how socio-demographic data can improve pluralistic offensiveness modeling. It finds that demographic information yields modest, inconsistent gains for individual predictions but clearer benefits at group and population levels due to aggregation. By explicitly reasoning about baseline judgments and demographic-specific deviations, the authors show that both components improve predictions, and that reasoning outperforms simple conditioning on demographics.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Which Demographics do LLMs Default to During Annotation?

The paper investigates which demographic attributes large language models (LLMs) default to when annotating text without explicit demographic cues. By comparing non‑demographic, placebo‑conditioned, and demographic‑conditioned prompts on politeness and offensiveness tasks in the POPQUORN dataset, the authors find that LLMs exhibit notable gender, race, and age influences in their annotations. This contrasts with earlier studies that reported no such effects, highlighting the importance of considering demographic bias in LLM‑based annotation workflows.

By Johannes Sch\"afer, Aidan Combs, Christopher Bagdon, Jiahui Li, Nadine Probol, Lynn Greschner, Sean Papay, Yarik Menchaca Resendiz, Aswathy Velutharambath, Amelie W\"uhrl, Sabine Weber, Roman Klinger
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Different Demographic Cues Yield Inconsistent Conclusions About LLM Personalization and Bias

The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) respond to different demographic cues—such as names—when users seek advice, focusing on race and gender in a U.S. context. It finds that using different cues for the same group leads to only partially overlapping changes in model responses, producing inconsistent conclusions about personalization and unstable bias metrics. The authors argue that LLMs react to linguistic signals tied to cues rather than to stable demographic categories, and they call for evaluations that use multiple cues and consider underlying mechanisms.

By Manuel Tonneau, Neil K. R. Sehgal, Niyati Malhotra, Sharif Kazemi, Victor Orozco-Olvera, Ana Mar\'ia Mu\~noz Boudet, Lakshmi Subramanian, Samuel P. Fraiberger, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Valentin Hofmann
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Moral Sensitivity in LLMs: A Tiered Evaluation of Contextual Bias via Behavioral Profiling and Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.

By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement

The paper introduces a novel framework for assessing second‑order bias in large language models (LLMs), defined as bias in how an LLM judges the acceptability of biased content. Using principles from entitlement epistemology, the authors design a reasoning task that asks LLMs to determine whether a biased text is acceptable for specific demographic groups, and propose two metrics to quantify biased judgments. Experiments on both open‑source and closed‑source models reveal that the task bypasses safety guardrails, uncovers systematic variations across target groups, and demonstrates that models still rely on demographic labels when evaluating bias.

By Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Raiyan Ahmed, Zhijing Jin, Shion Guha, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Adaptive Triggering for Bias Correction in LLM Reasoning

The paper introduces an adaptive triggering mechanism for bias correction in large language model (LLM) reasoning. By framing bias intervention as an online change‑point detection problem, the authors update a CUSUM statistic at each step using either a white‑box next‑token probability signal or a black‑box LLM judge signal, and inject corrective prompts only when the accumulated evidence exceeds a calibrated threshold. Experiments on gpt‑4o‑mini and six open‑weight models show that adaptive black‑box triggering restores most of the accuracy lost by fixed‑interval interventions while reducing the number of corrections, whereas the white‑box signal improves ambiguous‑item accuracy but can hurt disambiguated‑item accuracy due to difficulty distinguishing stereotype reliance from correct evidence.

By Nayoung Kim, Mickey Mancenido, Huan Liu