arXiv AI

Linguistic Triggers of Gender and Racial Bias in Open-Weight LLMs Applied to Recruitment

The paper reports the first systematic audit of open‑weight large language models (LLMs) in hiring contexts, examining how job‑posting language influences recruiter and job‑seeker simulations across six models. It finds that agentic language lowers recruiter scores for female candidates while communal language mitigates this effect, and that coded‑exclusion language sharply reduces recruiter scores for non‑White candidates and discourages non‑White personas from applying. The study also identifies the explicit demographic label as the main causal factor and proposes a concrete pre‑deployment audit protocol aligned with EU and U.S. regulatory requirements.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

Gender Bias in LLM Hiring Decisions: Evidence from a Japanese Context and Evaluation of Mitigation Strategies

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in hiring workflows, yet most research on gender bias in LLM hiring decisions has focused on English-language, Western-format resumes. This study examines whether pro-female gender bias extends to a Japanese corporate context and evaluates two practical mitigation strategies.

arXiv AI
Jul 14

BiasLab: A Multilingual Dual-Framing Framework for LLM Bias Measurement, Applied to Workplace and HR Contexts

arXiv:2601. 06861v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Background: Large language models (LLMs) harbor systematic biases that are particularly consequential in workplace and HR contexts, where their outputs increasingly influence hiring, job design, and organizational decisions.

By William Guey, Wei Zhang, Pei-Luen Patrick Rau, Pierrick Bougault, Vitor D. de Moura, Bertan Ucar, Jose O. Gomes
arXiv AI
2d ago

Beyond the Name: Demographic Leakage in De-Identified R\'esum\'es and Evaluation Artifacts in LLM Bias Audits

The paper examines whether removing declared language fields from de‑identified résumés eliminates demographic leakage in large language models. By keeping language attributes identical and varying only unstructured prose across five ethnocultural groups and three cue‑salience levels, the authors find that non‑language text still allows target‑group recovery (average 0.757, reaching 1.000 under high salience). They also show that evaluation design—such as allowing or forbidding ties—dramatically affects LLM‑as‑a‑judge outcomes, underscoring the importance of evaluation protocol in bias audits.

By Qiangju Chen, Yang Xiao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Lower-Resource, Higher Scores: Language Bias in LLM Evaluators

The paper demonstrates that large language model (LLM) evaluators, whether reward‑model based or prompted LLM‑as‑a‑Judge, exhibit significant language bias in multilingual settings. Experiments with semantically identical instruction‑response pairs across 23 languages reveal that lower‑resource languages receive higher scores, a bias that persists across eight open‑weight evaluators and is not detectable by standard pairwise accuracy metrics. The authors link the bias to model uncertainty and language identity, showing it cannot be explained by content difficulty alone.

By Ej Zhou, Lucas Resck, Zheng Hui, Anna Korhonen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24

How Robust Is Homogeneity Bias in LLMs? Evidence Across Models, Decoding Settings, and Identity Signals

arXiv:2501. 02211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reproduce homogeneity bias -- the tendency to portray marginalized groups as more internally similar than dominant groups -- but whether this bias generalizes across models, is stable under different inference settings, or depends on how group identity is signaled remains unstudied.

By Messi H. J. Lee
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