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
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.
By Kosuke Kitahara, Nobuhiro Yamaguchi
arXiv:2608.20351v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We ask whether stereotype-loaded queries about culturally marked people leak more personal information from a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) sy...
By Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan, Zexin Zhuang
arXiv:2607. 05679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) exhibit problematic biases, such as stereotypes.
By Damian Hodel, Jevin West, Aylin Caliskan
arXiv:2604. 01925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models increasingly suppress biased outputs when demographic identity is stated explicitly, yet may still exhibit implicit biases when identity is conveyed indirectly.
By Bhaskara Hanuma Vedula, Darshan Anghan, Ishita Goyal, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Abhijnan Chakraborty
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
The study examines how the design of audit questions influences perceived bias in large language models (LLMs). Using 40,726 requests across five models and three domains—hiring, lending, and medical triage—the authors find that demographic bias effects are not replicated when the audit is standardized. Instead, the audit’s construction, such as question phrasing and ordering, has a stronger impact on model responses than applicant demographics.
By Siddharth Vohra, Manikandan Ravikiran
The study examines how multilingual large language models (LLMs) produce outputs that differ across sociocultural contexts, highlighting that identity labels and source-language cues can mislead assessments of cultural grounding. Using a human‑validated, multi‑agent audit on 89,253 outputs from 12 LLMs in English, French, and Chinese across 18 occupations and three task conditions, the authors find that bias representation varies systematically by language and task. Removing direct identity cues reduces identity‑label prediction in English and Chinese but not in French, and the source language’s cultural context consistently receives the highest relevance score, though this signal weakens after translation or name masking.
"whyItMatters":"The findings show that surface cues can obscure true cross‑cultural patterns, underscoring the need for careful audit designs to avoid misleading conclusions about bias in multilingual LLMs."
By Yuanjun Feng, Tanzhou Liu, Stefan Feuerriegel, Yash Raj Shrestha
arXiv:2609.00222v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for subjective tasks, where annotators disagree and the relevant question is not only how...
By Daniela Occhipinti, Andrea Piergentili, Marco Guerini
arXiv:2606. 17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost.
By Joel Persson, M{\aa}rten Schultzberg, Sebastian Ankargren
arXiv:2609.16993v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Language Models are now common in student assessment, but we know little about how student demographics affect their use. Sometimes, considerin...
By Donya Rooein, Luca Benedetto, Dirk Hovy
arXiv:2608. 10385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as relevance assessors in information retrieval (IR) evaluation, raising questions about how assessor framing affects judgment reliability and downstream system comparison.
By Samaneh Mohtadi, Pietro Bernardelle, Joel Mackenzie, Gianluca Demartini