arXiv AI

How Humans and LLMs Read Gender into "Gender-Neutral" Physical Descriptions

The study introduces GAPA, a dataset of 316 physical attributes with 14,706 gender-association ratings from 304 US annotators, showing that such descriptions carry structured gender associations. It evaluates 16 LLMs, finding they partially mirror human ratings but exhibit biases such as compressed distributions, weaker alignment for men, and asymmetric abstention toward non‑binary identities. A proxy model trained on these data is released and applied to analyze character descriptions in LitBank, illustrating the persistence of gendered interpretations in ostensibly neutral language.

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 Computation and Language
Sep 17

Which Demographics do LLMs Default to During Annotation?

The paper investigates which demographic attributes large language models (LLMs) default to when annotating text without explicit demographic cues. By comparing non‑demographic, placebo‑conditioned, and demographic‑conditioned prompts on politeness and offensiveness tasks in the POPQUORN dataset, the authors find that LLMs exhibit notable gender, race, and age influences in their annotations. This contrasts with earlier studies that reported no such effects, highlighting the importance of considering demographic bias in LLM‑based annotation workflows.

By Johannes Sch\"afer, Aidan Combs, Christopher Bagdon, Jiahui Li, Nadine Probol, Lynn Greschner, Sean Papay, Yarik Menchaca Resendiz, Aswathy Velutharambath, Amelie W\"uhrl, Sabine Weber, Roman Klinger
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 1

Different Demographic Cues Yield Inconsistent Conclusions About LLM Personalization and Bias

The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) respond to different demographic cues—such as names—when users seek advice, focusing on race and gender in a U.S. context. It finds that using different cues for the same group leads to only partially overlapping changes in model responses, producing inconsistent conclusions about personalization and unstable bias metrics. The authors argue that LLMs react to linguistic signals tied to cues rather than to stable demographic categories, and they call for evaluations that use multiple cues and consider underlying mechanisms.

By Manuel Tonneau, Neil K. R. Sehgal, Niyati Malhotra, Sharif Kazemi, Victor Orozco-Olvera, Ana Mar\'ia Mu\~noz Boudet, Lakshmi Subramanian, Samuel P. Fraiberger, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Valentin Hofmann