arXiv AI

Mitigating Demographic Disparities in Explanation-Human Alignment via Rationale Regularization

The paper investigates explanation fairness in hate‑speech detection, noting that high classification accuracy does not guarantee equally plausible explanations for all demographic groups. Using the HateXplain dataset, the authors introduce Plausibility‑EFG, a metric that quantifies the largest difference in explanation plausibility across groups by comparing model‑generated token attributions with human‑annotated rationales. Experiments with BERT, RoBERTa, and an adversarially trained ADV‑RoBERTa show that the latter improves both classification performance and alignment with human rationales while reducing explanation disparities, and the study highlights that predictive fairness and explanation fairness are related but distinct objectives.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Sledgehammer or Scalpel? A Fine-grained Adaptive Framework for Implicit Hate Speech

The paper introduces FAID, a fine‑grained adaptive framework for detecting implicit hate speech. It first classifies samples into Shallow, Targeted, or Context‑Dependent categories and then applies tailored strategies—prompt‑tuning for shallow cases, knowledge augmentation for targeted ones, and an agentic prompt‑generation system for context‑dependent posts. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that FAID outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines by allocating computational effort only where needed.

By Han Wang, Yuhu Cheng, Xuesong Wang, Yi Zhu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Training-Time Explainability for Multilingual Hate Speech Detection: Aligning Model Reasoning with Human Rationales

The paper proposes a training‑time explainability framework that aligns model reasoning with human‑annotated rationales to improve both classification performance and interpretability for multilingual hate speech detection. It is evaluated on HateXplain (English) and BullySent (Hinglish), datasets that capture anti‑Muslim hate in culturally coded, multilingual forms. Using methods such as LIME, Integrated Gradients, Grad‑X‑Input, and attention, the study shows that gradient‑ and attention‑based regularization boosts F‑scores, enhances plausibility and faithfulness, and captures culturally specific cues for detecting implicit anti‑Muslim hate.

By Muhammad Deedahwar Mazhar Qureshi, Sannaan Khan, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Wael Rashwan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

BiasGym: A Simple and Generalizable Framework for Analyzing and Removing Biases through Injection

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Let's Unlearn Stereotypes Before Decision-Making: Assessing the Impact of Intrinsic Bias Mitigation on Downstream Fairness in LLMs

arXiv:2509. 16462v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes decision-making systems, where biased predictions can reinforce social and economic disparities.

By Mina Arzaghi, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Florian Carichon, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Plante, Golnoosh Farnadi
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

From Specialization to Generalization: Instruction-tuned LLMs for Robust Harmful Content Mitigation

The paper presents an instruction‑tuned large language model (LLM) based on Qwen3 that is fine‑tuned for hate speech mitigation by unifying 36 English hate speech datasets. The authors show that this generalist LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on in‑domain benchmarks and delivers significant gains in cross‑domain and cross‑lingual generalization, outperforming specialist encoder‑based classifiers.

By Lukas Edman, Daryna Dementieva, Alexander Fraser
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers

arXiv:2608. 09209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs.

By Chidaksh Ravuru, Shashank Srivastava
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

When Hate Meets Facts: LLMs-in-the-Loop for Check-worthiness Detection in Hate Speech

The paper introduces WSF-ARG+, a new dataset that pairs hate speech with check‑worthiness annotations, and presents an LLM‑in‑the‑loop framework to streamline the annotation process. Experiments with 12 open‑weight large language models demonstrate that the framework cuts human effort while maintaining annotation quality. The study also shows that incorporating check‑worthiness labels improves hate‑speech detection performance, boosting macro‑F1 scores for large models by up to 0.213 and averaging 0.154 across models.

By Nicol\'as Benjam\'in Ocampo, Tommaso Caselli, Davide Ceolin
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Representational alignment yields generalizable safety in language models

The paper argues that aligning large language models (LLMs) at the level of latent representations—specifically by matching their internal categorization of moral concepts to human prototype-based judgments—improves safety. Current alignment methods that focus on observable responses fail to preserve fine-grained moral categorization, leaving models vulnerable to adversarial rephrasings. By optimizing representational similarity, the authors demonstrate that LLMs can maintain more robust moral categorization and exhibit better adversarial robustness across multiple benchmarks and model sizes.

By Lingyu Li, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang, Xia Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Beyond Unsafe Detection: Counterfactually Anchored Evidence Attribution for Multi-Turn LLM Safety Failures

The paper introduces a counterfactually anchored evidence attribution approach for multi‑turn large language model safety failures. It presents a new dataset of 1,762 conversations, including adversarial, benign twins, and high‑risk vocabulary variants, and trains a lightweight hierarchical model that accurately predicts safety violations and attributes them to specific user turns and token spans. The model achieves high detection performance (F1 = 0.988) and significantly reduces adversarial confidence when top‑attributed tokens are removed, while maintaining low false‑positive rates on benign conversations.

By Srinivasan Subramanian, Kazi Aminul Islam, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan