arXiv AI

Authority Bias in Conversational Search Engines for Academic Paper Recommendation

The study examines whether large language models (LLMs) used as conversational search engines for academic literature prioritize papers based on authority signals—such as author prestige, venue, and citations—rather than content. By keeping titles and abstracts constant and manipulating authority metadata across three counterfactual conditions (original, flipped, boosted), the researchers tested eight LLMs in a single-turn, top‑1 recommendation scenario. Results reveal a substantial, directional authority bias that varies across models and is only partially mitigated by prompt-level debiasing, while also highlighting a significant say‑do gap where debiasing instructions suppress authority mentions more quickly than authority-driven flips, leading to underestimation of behavioral bias.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 11

Authority, Truth, and Citation Bias: A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Benchmark for Studying Epistemic Susceptibility in Large Language Models

Large language models are increasingly deployed in citation-augmented settings, yet the effect of citation presence on model behavior independent of factual content remains poorly understood. We introduce AuthorityBench, a 220,564-prompt multi-domain benchmark that isolates how citation-based authority signals influence epistemic behavior in LLMs.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Measuring Google AI Overviews: Activation, Source Quality, Claim Fidelity, and Publisher Impact

The study measures Google AI Overviews (AIOs), noting they activate for 13.7% of queries overall and 64.7% of question-form queries, with lower rates for politically sensitive topics. AIOs cite more credible domains than typical search results, yet 30% of cited pages are not shown in the first-page results, indicating a distinct source selection process. Among 98,020 atomic claims, 11.0% lack support from cited pages, mainly due to omissions, and over half of cited pages contain display ads, reducing publisher revenue while Google’s ads remain.

By Haofei Xu, Umar Iqbal, Jacob M. Montgomery
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Self-prompting and cross-model consensus enable reproducible data extraction from scientific literature with large language models

The paper investigates how large language models can extract contextualized data from scientific literature. It presents four workflows: expert‑written prompts, self‑generated prompts, autonomous literature discovery, and dataset creation from guidelines. While models perform well with prompts, they struggle with context, hallucinate references, and still need human oversight for final validation.

By Valentin Romanov, Monique Bax, Steven Niederer
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Attribution Bias in Large Language Models

The paper introduces AttriBench, a benchmark dataset that balances author fame and demographics to study quote attribution in large language models (LLMs). Using AttriBench, the authors evaluate 11 popular LLMs and find that accurate attribution remains difficult, with significant disparities across race, gender, and intersectional groups. They also identify a new failure mode—suppression—where models omit attribution entirely, which is unevenly distributed across demographics and not reflected by standard accuracy metrics.

By Eliza Berman, Bella Chang, Daniel B. Neill, Emily Black
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Are Non-English Papers Reviewed Fairly? Language-of-Study Bias in NLP Peer Reviews

The paper investigates language-of-study (LoS) bias in NLP peer reviews, defining and distinguishing negative and positive forms of bias. Using a new dataset, LOBSTER, and an LLM-based detection pipeline, the authors analyze 15,645 reviews and find that non‑English papers experience significantly higher bias rates, with negative bias outweighing positive bias. They further identify four subcategories of negative bias, noting that demanding unjustified cross‑lingual generalization is the most common.

By Ehsan Barkhordar, Abdulfattah Safa, Verena Blaschke, Erika Lombart, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, G\"ozde G\"ul \c{S}ahin