arXiv Machine Learning

Exploratory As-Analyzed No-Detection of Culturally-Marked Predicate-Triggered PII Amplification in a Synthetic-English RAG Probe: A Predicate-Resource-Confounded Audit

arXiv AI
3d ago

Obscuring Data Contamination Through Translation: Evidence from Arabic Corpora

The study investigates how exposing large language models to Arabic translations of English benchmark tasks can hide data contamination from standard English-only detection methods. By testing four instruction-tuned models with increasing Arabic exposure, the authors find that traditional probes like TS-Guessing and Min-K%++ fail to detect contamination, yet English performance still improves. They propose a new Translation-Aware Contamination Detection (TACD) method that uses cross-lingual consistency and choice reordering to reveal contamination effects that are otherwise invisible to English-only diagnostics.

By Chaymaa Abbas, Nour Shammaa, Mariette Awad
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Prompt Revision as a Source of Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Systems

The paper "Prompt Revision as a Source of Cultural Bias in Text-to-Image Systems" investigates how commercial text‑to‑image models silently modify user prompts before generating images, a step that is often hidden from users. Using the multilingual benchmark WORLDVIEW, the authors audit the revision layer in DALL‑E‑3, Imagen‑4, and GPT‑Image‑1.5, finding that non‑Western and non‑Anglophone contexts are disproportionately marked, reduced to narrow vocabularies, and stereotyped. The study demonstrates that the revision layer itself is a previously undocumented causal source of cultural stereotyping, underscoring the need to audit deployed systems rather than just the underlying models.

By Aleksandra Urman, Elsa Lichtenegger, Salima Jaoua, Azza Bouleimen, Robin Forsberg, Corinna Hertweck, Stefania Ionescu, Nicol\`o Pagan, Ancsa Hannak, Joachim Baumann
arXiv AI
Sep 16

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 AI
Aug 25

Beyond Surface Cues: Disentangling Sociocultural Signals in Multilingual LLMs

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 AI
Sep 24

Recognized but Not Produced: A Generation Benchmark for Culturally Specific Kinship Terms

The paper introduces a generation benchmark for culturally specific kinship terms, evaluating five open‑weight large language models (LLMs) on Hindi, Tamil, and Korean. Unlike prior multiple‑choice tests that treat kinship understanding as a recognition task, the study prompts LLMs to generate terms across two communicative tasks and compares results to a matched option‑supported baseline. Findings show that while models like GPT‑OSS120B and Llama‑3.370B can select correct terms in over 90% and 78% of cases respectively, they produce the correct term only 36% and 24% of the time, indicating a significant evaluation‑format gap and highlighting the difficulty of culturally specific kinship generation even when relationships are explicitly stated.

By Sahil Pardasani, Madhusudan Singh
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Fairness Beyond Anonymization? Demographic Leakage in German LLM-Generated Resumes

The study audits demographic leakage in German-language resumes generated by large language models. Using ChatGPT, Gemini, and Qwen 3 variants, the authors generate resumes from anonymized profiles, varying only gender- and ethnicity-associated names while keeping qualifications constant. Even after anonymization and gender-neutralization, classifiers can reliably distinguish male- from female-generated resumes, driven by subtle differences in gender-neutral terminology rather than overtly gendered wording; ethnicity-related leakage remains weak.

By Charlotte Leininger, Helena Veit, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Andreas Bender
arXiv AI
Jun 2

IndoBias: A Dual Track Culturally Grounded Benchmark for LLMs Bias Evaluation in Indonesian Languages

arXiv:2606. 01260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite being home to more than 1300 ethnic groups and 700 indigenous languages, bias in Large Language Models has not been fully studied in Indonesia, thus leaving a critical gap in evaluating representational fairness and localized stereotypes within its uniquely vast, multilingual, and diverse sociocultural landscape.

By Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Muhammad Falensi Azmi, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Fajri Koto