arXiv AI

Beyond Surface Cues: Disentangling Sociocultural Signals in Multilingual LLMs

The study examines how multilingual large language models (LLMs) produce outputs that differ across sociocultural contexts, highlighting that identity labels and source-language cues can mislead assessments of cultural grounding. Using a human‑validated, multi‑agent audit on 89,253 outputs from 12 LLMs in English, French, and Chinese across 18 occupations and three task conditions, the authors find that bias representation varies systematically by language and task. Removing direct identity cues reduces identity‑label prediction in English and Chinese but not in French, and the source language’s cultural context consistently receives the highest relevance score, though this signal weakens after translation or name masking. "whyItMatters":"The findings show that surface cues can obscure true cross‑cultural patterns, underscoring the need for careful audit designs to avoid misleading conclusions about bias in multilingual LLMs."

arXiv AI
Jun 2

IndoBias: A Dual Track Culturally Grounded Benchmark for LLMs Bias Evaluation in Indonesian Languages

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24

How Robust Is Homogeneity Bias in LLMs? Evidence Across Models, Decoding Settings, and Identity Signals

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