arXiv Computation and Language

Intersectional Fairness in Large Language Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Let's Unlearn Stereotypes Before Decision-Making: Assessing the Impact of Intrinsic Bias Mitigation on Downstream Fairness in LLMs

arXiv:2509. 16462v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes decision-making systems, where biased predictions can reinforce social and economic disparities.

By Mina Arzaghi, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Florian Carichon, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Plante, Golnoosh Farnadi
arXiv AI
Oct 28

Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained

The paper "Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained" surveys and clarifies various fairness notions applicable to language models (LMs). It introduces a taxonomy categorizing these concepts by transformer architecture—encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder—and demonstrates each definition through experiments to illustrate practical implications. The authors also discuss current research challenges and open questions to encourage further innovation in the field.

By Zhipeng Yin, Zichong Wang, Avash Palikhe, Wenbin Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

Fair-GPTQ: Bias-Aware Quantization for Large Language Models

Fair-GPTQ is a quantization method for large language models that incorporates explicit group‑fairness constraints into the quantization objective. By guiding the rounding operation, it reduces bias in generated text, particularly for occupational stereotypes and discriminatory language across gender, race, and religion. The approach maintains at least 90 % of baseline accuracy on zero‑shot benchmarks while preserving the memory and speed benefits of 4‑bit quantization.

By Irina Proskurina, Guillaume Metzler, Julien Velcin
arXiv Computation and Language
1d ago

From Language to Country to Valence: A Multilingual Audit of Stereotype Bias Across LLMs

The paper presents a multilingual audit of stereotype bias in large language models (LLMs) using 12,000 locally written Reddit posts in English, Spanish, French, and German. It evaluates gender, racial, and religious bias across six models (three open-weight and three proprietary APIs) with a two-blank design to reduce grammatical cues, finding that religion shows the highest imbalance, Spanish leads in gender bias, and German in race and religion. The study highlights that aggregate scores can mask category- and context-specific biases, underscoring the need for detailed inspection before deploying LLMs in consequential settings.

By Zihao Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

FairLens: Benchmarking Fairness in Vision-Language Models for High-Stakes Decision-Making

FairLens is a benchmark and evaluation framework that measures fairness and validity of vision‑language models (VLMs) in high‑stakes domains such as hiring, legal, and healthcare. It uses over 100,000 face‑image and question pairs covering gender, race, and age, and assesses responses through demographic parity, soundness, demographic association, and bias in free‑text generation. The study finds that VLMs often make unwarranted inferences from faces rather than abstaining, especially in legal and healthcare contexts, and that small parity gaps can still hide unsafe treatment across groups.

By Vahid Reza Khazaie, Ahmed Y. Radwan, Shaina Raza
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

MBBQ: A Dataset for Cross-Lingual Comparison of Stereotypes in Generative LLMs

MBBQ (Multilingual Bias Benchmark for Question-answering) is a curated extension of the English BBQ dataset that includes Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish, designed to measure stereotypes across these languages while controlling for cultural differences and task accuracy. The dataset also provides a parallel control set to assess question-answering performance independently of bias. Experiments with several open-source and proprietary LLMs show that non‑English languages can exhibit greater bias than English, and cross‑lingual bias differences persist except in the most accurate models.

By Vera Neplenbroek, Arianna Bisazza, Raquel Fern\'andez
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Attribution Bias in Large Language Models

The paper introduces AttriBench, a benchmark dataset that balances author fame and demographics to study quote attribution in large language models (LLMs). Using AttriBench, the authors evaluate 11 popular LLMs and find that accurate attribution remains difficult, with significant disparities across race, gender, and intersectional groups. They also identify a new failure mode—suppression—where models omit attribution entirely, which is unevenly distributed across demographics and not reflected by standard accuracy metrics.

By Eliza Berman, Bella Chang, Daniel B. Neill, Emily Black