arXiv Computation and Language

Bias Mitigation in Audio-Enabled LLMs through Adversarial Training and Distillation Methods

The paper presents methods to reduce gender bias in audio‑enabled large language models (AuLLMs) by using adversarial training to unlearn gender perception without harming performance on other tasks. It also introduces a distillation approach that retains gender awareness but aligns responses with a gender‑agnostic teacher unless explicitly prompted. Experiments on three AuLLMs show promising results for gender‑unlearning and partial success for the distillation technique.

arXiv AI
Sep 11

Voice or Stereotype? Disentangling Acoustic and Content-Based Gender in Speech-to-Speech Models

The study investigates how speech‑to‑speech (S2S) models handle gender, distinguishing between the acoustic voice and the content’s gender cues. Experiments across five models in English, Spanish, and Mandarin show that while the rendered voice remains unbiased, the models consistently attribute speaker gender based on textual content rather than voice. When content and voice disagree, misgendering rates soar to 90%, whereas agreement yields only 2% misgendering.

By Xiaoqun Liu, Tanu Mitra, Harshit Rajgarhia, Abhishek Mukherji
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Face-voice Association across LAnguages and Gender (FLAG) 2027 Challenge Evaluation Plan

arXiv:2609.17913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Face--voice association models may rely on language or gender cues in the voice rather than on speaker-specific voice characteristics, which can lead t...

By Marta Moscati, Swapnil Khandoker, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Shah Nawaz, Fatima Noor, Rohan Kumar Das, Mubashir Noman, Junaid Mir, Muhammad Haroon Yousaf, Khalid Malik, Markus Schedl
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Alignment Reduces Expressed but Not Encoded Gender Bias: A Unified Framework and Study

The paper introduces a unified framework that simultaneously measures intrinsic (encoded) and extrinsic (expressed) gender bias in large language models using identical neutral prompts. It finds a consistent link between latent gender information and output bias, but shows that alignment via supervised fine‑tuning reduces expressed bias while leaving internal gender associations largely intact and reactivatable by adversarial prompts. The study also demonstrates that debiasing gains on structured benchmarks may not transfer to realistic tasks such as story generation.

By Nour Bouchouchi, Thibault Laugel, Xavier Renard, Christophe Marsala, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Marcin Detyniecki
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Linguistically Augmented Audio Speech Data (LinguAS)

arXiv:2606. 10246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Maliciously-created fake speech, including deepfaked and spoofed audio, is proliferating at an alarming rate, and detection models are racing to stay ahead of the curve.

By Ashley R. Keaton, Zahra Khanjani, Christine Mallinson, Vandana P. Janeja
arXiv AI
Jun 18

Speaker Verification with Speech-Aware LLMs: Evaluation and Augmentation

arXiv:2603. 10827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech-aware large language models (LLMs) can accept speech inputs, yet their training objectives largely emphasize linguistic content or specific fields such as emotions or the speaker's gender, leaving it unclear whether they encode speaker identity.

By Thomas Thebaud, Yuzhe Wang, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Jesus Villalba-Lopez, Najim Dehak
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

AnchorPrompt: Self-Distilled Soft Prompts for Robust Audio-Language Models

AnchorPrompt is an adaptation technique for large audio‑language models that keeps the base model frozen and learns a single block of prompt vectors inserted at the decoder input. By training these prompts through self‑distillation on diverse audio and text perturbations, the method improves answer consistency and reduces hallucinations across multiple benchmarks. The approach is perturbation‑agnostic at inference, enabling zero‑shot transfer to unseen distortions such as reverberation and choice permutations.

By Pooneh Mousavi, Amir Ivry, Mirco Ravanelli, Cem Subakan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

Gender Bias in Vision-Language In-Context Learning

The paper investigates how in‑context learning (ICL) in large vision‑language models (LVLMs) can amplify gender bias. Using the VL‑BICLE framework, the authors show that gendered ICL demonstrations shift model bias toward the demonstrated gender, especially in tasks involving gendered language such as image captioning and pronoun prediction. They find that similarity‑based retrieval does not mitigate this bias and that replacing real images with synthetic ones from stable diffusion reduces bias without hurting caption quality.

By Tong Xiang, Noa Garcia, Yuta Nakashima