arXiv Computation and Language

Invisibilization as a Source of Probability Bias in Language Models

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI and Anthropic exhibit probability bias when deciding whether to trust information from reporters of different racial descriptions. Using a two‑urn Bayesian game and 6,600 sessions, the authors find that models often refuse to assess a reporter’s credibility—especially for Black‑described reporters—yet when they do assess, Black reporters receive slightly higher trust. The bias is subtle, growing with reasoning effort, and is not detected by standard audits that compare average trust or only assessed cases.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

Harm Is Behavioural, Moderation Is Lexical: How Language and Culture Decide Whom Automated Safety Systems Protect and Whom They Silence

The paper examines how automated safety systems unevenly flag harmful content, disproportionately labeling African American English as offensive and misclassifying content from drag queens and white nationalists. It identifies seven failure modes rooted in vocabulary-based harm detection and proposes an evaluation protocol that highlights gaps in performance across languages. Applied to five open systems in eleven languages, the study finds that none achieve native-speaker accuracy, and higher capability often increases discrimination, widening the disparity between best- and worst-served language communities.

By Gabriel Lars Sabadin, Dr Nicola Harding, Sarah Kingston
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Evaluating Second-Order Bias of LLMs Through Epistemic Entitlement

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 Machine Learning
Jul 1

Surrogate Fidelity: When Can Open LLMs Explain Closed Ones?

arXiv:2606. 32008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability (MI) requires full access to model internals, yet the APIs for most widely deployed language models at best expose log-probabilities over output tokens.

By Philippe Chlenski, Zachariah Carmichael, Ayush Warikoo, Chia-Tse Shao, Yingxiao Ye, Aobo Yang, Vivek Miglani, Nehal Bandi
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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

Lower-Resource, Higher Scores: Language Bias in LLM Evaluators

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
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Linguistic Triggers of Gender and Racial Bias in Open-Weight LLMs Applied to Recruitment

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