Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to guide urban safety decisions, but this study shows that their judgments are more influenced by neighborhood names than by geographic coordinates. Across seven instruct‑tuned models tested on 186 neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago, name‑based ratings varied significantly and correlated with the proportion of locally dominant marginalized groups, while coordinate‑only ratings remained largely flat. The research finds that removing neighborhood names reduces both bias and accuracy, highlighting the complex role of demographic stereotypes and crime signals in LLM safety assessments.
arXiv:2503.00610v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding how people perceive urban environments is essential for inclusive planning, yet conventional surveys are costly and difficult t...
The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can predict neighborhood-level human mobility without training data. Using anonymized Cuebiq data across four U.S. metropolitan areas, the authors compare zero‑shot LLM predictions to supervised baselines for various mobility outcomes and assess structural alignment with empirical trends. Results show supervised models outperform LLMs (average accuracy 0.580 vs. 0.435), with LLMs relying on coarse, stable priors that may exhibit biased treatment of protected-group predictors.
arXiv:2606. 06694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly assuming an intermediary role in housing search through the integration of listing platforms within conversational interfaces, mediating access to information, search, and recommendations within urban settings.
arXiv:2606. 00369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe global deployment of AI models requires alignment with human values that vary across cultures.
The paper introduces GUISE, a benchmark of criminal‑assistance scenarios drawn from real‑world cases and organized using the UNODC International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes. It evaluates large language models under three linguistic framings and across five cultures, finding that framing and cultural adaptation significantly increase unsafe compliance rates. The study also shows that unsafe responses from the least‑safe models exhibit strong Anglocentric language, with leakage growing alongside harmfulness.
arXiv:2508. 13187v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Homelessness is a persistent social challenge, impacting millions worldwide.
The paper introduces Counterfactual Neighborhood Risk Fields (CNRF), an evidence‑grounded framework that improves safety for vision‑language models (VLMs). CNRF builds context‑matched benign‑harmful counterfactual pairs, uses their representation differences to define risk directions, and separates neighborhood support from risk estimation. This approach allows selective intervention rather than blanket rejection, achieving high macro defense success rates across multiple VLMs while preserving benign‑task utility.
The study evaluates name-based bias in six local large language models using a fill-in-the-blank task with first names from U.S. Social Security and a race classification dataset. Across 300,000 responses, the models consistently favored names that were less stereotypically male, older, popular, and white, with gender bias being the strongest effect. The bias varied with sentence context but remained significant, underscoring the persistence of name bias in local LLMs.
Names carry demographic indicators such as age, gender, and race, which makes them a subtle but strong target of bias in large language models (LLMs). In this work, we present an evaluation of name-ba...
The study presents a reproducible spatial simulation audit that combines a generative adversarial network for patrol allocation with a probabilistic detection model to assess patrol detection disparities in Baltimore and Chicago. Using archived crime records and census data, the authors compare GAN-based allocation to empirical and uniform deployment across multiple random seeds, finding detection-rate differences between Black-majority and White-majority areas ranging from –2.03 to 0.75 percentage points and coverage between 1.78% and 7.50%. The audit also evaluates a conditional tabular generative model for synthetic replacement, noting that geographic consistency fails in many cases, and highlights how simulated disparities depend on observation processes, allocation policies, training budgets, and randomness.
The paper presents multicalibration as a method for unbiased prevalence estimation when measurement devices (diagnostic tests, classifiers, or large language models) exhibit covariate shift. It shows that standard calibration fails under such shift, while multicalibration—calibrating conditional on input features—maintains near-zero bias in simulations and real-world applications. The authors demonstrate the approach on employment data across U.S. states and political text classification across four countries, emphasizing the need for calibration data that covers key feature dimensions.
Large language models are candidates for collecting and analyzing records in criminal investigations and mass surveillance. Their capability and accuracy in this work cannot currently be measured. Rea...