The paper investigates how large language and visual‑language models used in autonomous vehicles inherit human driver biases when deciding whether to yield to pedestrians. It introduces two new bias‑testing methods—All Else Being Equal and Self‑Consistency tests—to evaluate these models. Results reveal that the models’ yielding decisions are influenced by pedestrian attributes such as gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, skin tone, and socio‑economic status, with varying patterns across models.
By Irem Yoldas, Martim Brand\~ao, Jie Zhang, Odinaldo Rodrigues
FairLens is a benchmark and evaluation framework that measures fairness and validity of vision‑language models (VLMs) in high‑stakes domains such as hiring, legal, and healthcare. It uses over 100,000 face‑image and question pairs covering gender, race, and age, and assesses responses through demographic parity, soundness, demographic association, and bias in free‑text generation. The study finds that VLMs often make unwarranted inferences from faces rather than abstaining, especially in legal and healthcare contexts, and that small parity gaps can still hide unsafe treatment across groups.
By Vahid Reza Khazaie, Ahmed Y. Radwan, Shaina Raza
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...
By Ciro Beneduce, Bruno Lepri, Massimiliano Luca
arXiv:2608.29590v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose a societal bias evaluation method for large vision-language models (LVLMs) in the era of strong safety guardrails. Existing benchmarks rely...
By Yusuke Hirota, Michael Ross Boone, Arun George Zachariah, Jibin Rajan Varghese, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Boyi Li, Ryo Hachiuma
arXiv:2606. 11016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We ask whether large language models (LLMs) merely imitate rationales when choosing between two options, or whether their choices reflect a systematic underlying decision structure.
By Gabriel Freedman, Francesca Toni
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
arXiv:2606. 17362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent.
By Xinglong Sun, Kevin Xie, Jenny Schmalfuss, Despoina Paschalidou, Xiuming Zhang, Sanja Fidler, Kashyap Chitta, Jose M. Alvarez
LightEMMA is a longitudinal evaluation framework that tests the autonomous driving performance of vision‑language models (VLMs) without fine‑tuning or prompt engineering. Using this protocol, the authors evaluated 15 VLMs from five major families on the nuScenes prediction benchmark and found that larger, more capable models do not consistently outperform earlier generations. The study identifies common failure modes such as overreliance on historical actions and difficulty reconciling conflicting visual cues, underscoring the need for domain‑specific adaptation to enhance VLM safety in autonomous driving.
By Zhijie Qiao, Haowei Li, Zhong Cao, Henry X. Liu
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:2606.20980v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: As Self-Driving Cars continue to expand internationally and use multi-modal systems such as VLMs as a cognitive backbone for their Action mod...
By Adrian Cespedes, Marcelo Chincha, Dunant Cusipuma, Victor Flores-Benites, David Ortega, Arturo Deza
The paper introduces a novel framework for assessing second‑order bias in large language models (LLMs), defined as bias in how an LLM judges the acceptability of biased content. Using principles from entitlement epistemology, the authors design a reasoning task that asks LLMs to determine whether a biased text is acceptable for specific demographic groups, and propose two metrics to quantify biased judgments. Experiments on both open‑source and closed‑source models reveal that the task bypasses safety guardrails, uncovers systematic variations across target groups, and demonstrates that models still rely on demographic labels when evaluating bias.
By Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Raiyan Ahmed, Zhijing Jin, Shion Guha, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
arXiv:2608.21415v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks; however, they often inherit social biases fro...
By Yisong Xiao, Aishan Liu, Yongxin Huang, Zonghao Ying, Shiji Zhao, Tianlin Li, Yong Han, Jian Yang, Xianglong Liu