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.
Large language models (LLMs) often shift their outputs in response to implicit demographic cues even when users never state a demographic identity. Previous work has documented this behavior, but the connection between these behavioral changes and the model's internal activations remains unclear.
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.
arXiv:2501. 02211v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reproduce homogeneity bias -- the tendency to portray marginalized groups as more internally similar than dominant groups -- but whether this bias generalizes across models, is stable under different inference settings, or depends on how group identity is signaled remains unstudied.
arXiv:2608. 11735v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often shift their outputs in response to implicit demographic cues even when users never state a demographic identity.
arXiv:2501. 02211v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reproduce homogeneity bias -- the tendency to portray marginalized groups as more internally similar than dominant groups -- but whether this bias is stable or an artifact of inference settings has only been studied in single proprietary models.
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.
The study evaluates name-based bias in six local large language models using a fill-in-the-blank task with first names from U.S. Social Security and a race classification dataset. Across 300,000 responses, the models consistently favored names that were less stereotypically male, older, popular, and white, with gender bias being the strongest effect. The bias varied with sentence context but remained significant, underscoring the persistence of name bias in local LLMs.
The paper introduces BASIS-Bench, a benchmark that separates demographic robustness, stereotypical bias, and personalization in speech large language models (LLMs). It evaluates eight recent speech LLMs, finding that while many models detect demographic cues, they rarely use them for appropriate personalization, and explicit demographic labels can worsen stereotypical associations. The study underscores the necessity of training speech LLMs to discern when demographic information should influence responses.
As Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in critical applications, robustly evaluating their social biases is paramount. However, the current literature suffers from widespread methodological fragmentation, which yields contradictory conclusions.
The paper introduces Population Fidelity, an evaluation framework for assessing how well large language models (LLMs) represent human population attitudes. It focuses on three dimensions: group-level accuracy, between-group variation, and the structure of that variation. Using the framework, the authors replicate a prior study on machine bias and test cultural fine-tuning, finding that while fine-tuning improves overall alignment, it does not enhance representation of within-population differences.
arXiv:2609.00222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for subjective tasks, where annotators disagree and the relevant question is not only how...
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for subjective tasks, where annotators disagree and the relevant question is not only how accurate a judge is, but whose judgments it repro...