arXiv AI

Institutional Prestige as Geographic Bias in Large Language Models: Evidence from Three Factorial Experiments with Bootstrap Confidence Intervals

The study examines whether large language models (LLMs) discriminate against candidates based on institutional prestige and geographic location. Three factorial experiments (4,320 API calls across four LLMs and five domains) reveal a significant institution‑tier gradient (+0.297 points on a 10‑point scale), a stronger prestige effect than country‑of‑origin effect, and a dominant journal prestige effect (Nature vs. a peripheral journal). The authors also identify a ‘rescue effect’ where publishing in Nature mitigates low institutional prestige, and quantify bias using the Neutrosophic Bias Index, highlighting evaluation inconsistency for low‑prestige profiles.

arXiv AI
Aug 7

Who Gets Access? Global Region and Academic Status Bias in AI-Generated Academic Gatekeeping Scenarios

arXiv:2608. 05178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Equitable access to scientific knowledge often depends on informal gatekeeping decisions, particularly when resources such as paywalled articles, datasets, or professional materials such as curriculum vitae (CV) must be shared selectively.

By Nouar AlDahoul, Hezerul Abdul Karim, Myles Joshua Toledo Tan
arXiv AI
Sep 10

The Audit Decides the Verdict: Instrument Effects Rival Demographic Bias in LLM Decision Audits

The study examines how the design of audit questions influences perceived bias in large language models (LLMs). Using 40,726 requests across five models and three domains—hiring, lending, and medical triage—the authors find that demographic bias effects are not replicated when the audit is standardized. Instead, the audit’s construction, such as question phrasing and ordering, has a stronger impact on model responses than applicant demographics.

By Siddharth Vohra, Manikandan Ravikiran
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 AI
Aug 20

Computational Orientalism: Measuring Structural Discourse Bias in Large Language Models Using the Middle East Cultural Sensitivity Score (MECSS)

The paper introduces the Middle East Cultural Sensitivity Score (MECSS) to quantify Orientalist bias in large language models, converting Said’s seven Orientalist operations into measurable dimensions. Using 280 conversations, it finds that GPT‑4 and Falcon3‑7B‑Instruct systematically reproduce Orientalist patterns, with Falcon scoring higher despite being regionally built. The study highlights that geographic origin alone does not mitigate bias and identifies a new failure mode, "Said‑washing," present in 87.9% of GPT‑4 interactions.

By Maha Shahid
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Cultural Misalignment in Large Language Models: Detection, Measurement, and Mitigation Through Targeted Fine-Tuning

The paper evaluates three open‑weight large language models—Gemma3‑12B (USA), Bielik‑11B‑v3 (Poland), and Qwen3‑4B (China)—against World Values Survey data for 63 demographic personas across three countries, using normalized Wasserstein distance to measure cultural misalignment. Surprisingly, none of the models shows a preference for its home country; Qwen3‑4B, built in China, has the highest misalignment for Chinese respondents. Targeted LoRA fine‑tuning on the five worst‑case personas, with fewer than 1,200 training pairs and under 15 minutes on a single GPU, reduces bias by 16.8% for Bielik‑11B, but the fine‑tuning redistributes bias rather than eliminating it, shifting worst‑case personas from American to Chinese elderly.

By Antoni Czolgowski, Abel Iyasele