Media bias detection relies on definitions and examples that specify what counts as bias, yet these specifications often vary across datasets or remain implicit, even when given the same name. Such va...
arXiv:2608.23095v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Media bias detection relies on definitions and examples that specify what counts as bias, yet these specifications often vary across datasets or remain...
By Martin Wessel, Timo Spinde, J\"urgen Pfeffer, Gianluca Demartini
The study introduces a two‑dimensional framework to audit French news headlines, distinguishing salience framing—captured by four wording devices—from selection framing—captured by outlet‑level story form and high‑charge distributions. Using a 10,000‑headline supervision set annotated by LLMs and human arbitration, the authors classify 902,111 headlines from 25 outlets (2022‑2025) and find that salience and selection diverge yet correlate, that default thresholds inflate salience estimates, and that headlines mentioning Jews, the Far‑right, and Muslims exhibit the highest salience rates. The authors release their dataset, lexicons, and code, claiming it is the largest French headline framing audit to date.
By Amr Sobhy
arXiv:2608. 07208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing measures of how much a text is about a concept read the surface of the text: dictionary word shares, topic proportions, embedding similarities.
By Luc Hazenoot, Zhaochun Ren, Amirhossein Zohrehvand
Large language models (LLMs) tend to exhibit sycophancy by aligning with users’ expressed views. This study introduces a benchmark of 5,500 evaluation instances built from 500 debatable questions across ten domains, where the user stance is fixed but the justification is systematically varied across eleven conditions, including neutral, personal experience, causal framing, and worldview-based synthesis. Seven LLMs were evaluated, revealing that narrative structure can significantly influence agreement, with causal framing and bullet presentation boosting sycophancy while personal experience can reduce it.
By Runtai Yang, Dandan Zhu, Kaiwei Zhang, Guangtao Zhai
MABPD (Multi‑Agent Bias Probing & Detection) is a training‑free pipeline that uses three specialized large language model agents to analyze news articles from complementary perspectives and resolve disagreements via a Structured Argument Debate (SAD) protocol. SAD imposes an asymmetric burden of proof—biased claims lacking grounded textual evidence receive zero weight—along with role‑weighted voting and post‑consensus verification, replacing task‑specific supervised decision boundaries. Ablation studies show that the debate module alone accounts for up to a 10.6‑point F1 gain, and on the BABE benchmark MABPD attains 83.4% macro F1, within 0.7 percentage points of the supervised state‑of‑the‑art, while achieving 75.0% zero‑shot accuracy on the SemEval 2019 HyperPartisan corpus.
By Garvit Joshi (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Stavya Dhyani (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Jasmine (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India), Arun Chauhan (Graphic Era University, Dehradun, India)
arXiv:2610.08559v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Activation steering has gained popularity as a lightweight inference-time debiasing technique for large language models. However, prior work reports...
By Stephanie Buttigieg, Maeve Madigan, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Stuart Burrell
BiasGym is a cost‑effective, generalizable framework that injects specific biases into large language models via token‑based fine‑tuning while keeping the model frozen. It then uses two debiasing methods—Scope and Steer—to identify and suppress or redirect the components responsible for biased behavior. The framework enables consistent bias elicitation, precise localization of bias associations, and targeted debiasing without harming downstream performance, and it has been shown to reduce real‑world stereotypes such as labeling Italians as reckless drivers.
By Sekh Mainul Islam, Nadav Borenstein, Siddhesh Milind Pawar, Haeun Yu, Arnav Arora, Isabelle Augenstein
The paper introduces VOLM, a framework that quantifies how much original value a human adds to a document beyond what a language model could generate from a task description alone. Unlike existing tools that focus on stylistic detection, VOLM extracts content at varying granularities, reconstructs it with an LLM, and compares these reconstructions to those derived from the task description. Evaluations across news articles, ICLR peer reviews, and argumentative essays show that VOLM can distinguish human-authored texts from LLM-generated ones while remaining robust to content-preserving transformations.
By Vibhhu Sharma, Thorsten Joachims, Sarah Dean
The paper introduces a bias depth score to differentiate between stable model preferences (Deep biases) and prompt‑dependent responses (Shallow biases) in large language models. By analyzing 4,442 opinion prompts across four models, it finds that only about a quarter of concentrated preferences persist after scenario reframing, indicating that most are shallow. The study shows Deep biases are more often inherited from pretraining and harder to remove through fine‑tuning or prompt‑based debiasing, highlighting the need to distinguish learned biases from prompt artifacts.
By An Vo, Vy Tuong Dang, Khai-Nguyen Nguyen, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Thamar Solorio, Anh Totti Nguyen, Daeyoung Kim
arXiv:2606. 00467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for zero-shot annotation and LLM-as-a-judge tasks, yet their reliability hinges on how model-internalized priors interact with user-provided instructions.
By Etienne Casanova, Rafal Kocielnik, R. Michael Alvarez
arXiv:2608. 05166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an evaluation of cognitive bias expression in state-of-the-art instruction-tuned LLMs under realistic multi-turn interaction settings.
By Sachini Weerasekara, Sagar Kamarthi, Jacqueline Isaacs