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...
By Daniela Occhipinti, Andrea Piergentili, Marco Guerini
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
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...
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.
By Messi H. J. Lee
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.
By Bhaskara Hanuma Vedula, Darshan Anghan, Ishita Goyal, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Abhijnan Chakraborty
The paper investigates covert dialect bias in large language models (LLMs) by analyzing how internal probability distributions associate different English varieties—Standard American English, African American Vernacular English, Nigerian Standard English, and Nigerian Pidgin—with housing-related adjectives. Using 260 meaning‑matched sentence quadruples and log‑probability scoring across ten open‑weight LLMs, the study finds that AAVE and NP are consistently linked to more negative adjectives than SAE, with NP experiencing the greatest penalty. The bias varies by context and stereotype cluster, and Nigerian Standard English shows a context‑dependent shift, being favored in formal tenant screening but penalized in more socially proximate scenarios.
By Chowdhury Mohammad Abdullah, Rita Orji
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
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.
By Messi H. J. Lee
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
arXiv:2606. 01260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite being home to more than 1300 ethnic groups and 700 indigenous languages, bias in Large Language Models has not been fully studied in Indonesia, thus leaving a critical gap in evaluating representational fairness and localized stereotypes within its uniquely vast, multilingual, and diverse sociocultural landscape.
By Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, Muhammad Falensi Azmi, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Fajri Koto
The paper investigates whether language models still encode occupational biases even when they appear unbiased in behavioral tests. Using a causal framework, the authors separate bias into internal representations of user competence and observable outputs, deriving steering vectors that show these representations influence model behavior in question‑answering and hiring tasks. Across several open‑weight models, demographic factors such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status affect the models’ internal competence representations, revealing hidden bias that behavioral metrics alone may miss.
By Keren Fuentes, Aaron Mueller
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assess social bias in text, but the passages they evaluate often contain surface noise such as typos and broken punctuation. This study applied five realistic noise conditions at varying intensities to 3,822 stereotype‑related responses and compared bias judgments on noisy versus original text. The findings show that noise disproportionately turns neutral judgments into biased ones—up to 120 times more likely—while rarely converting biased judgments into neutral ones, and that the most fragile LLM judge exhibits the greatest distortion at mild noise levels. As LLMs become more robust, the bias distortion tends toward parity rather than reversal, meaning bias measured on noisy text is systematically overestimated, especially in fairness‑critical categories.
By DongHyun Ryu, Jaehyeok Lee, YeongJun Hwang, JinYeong Bak