arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Bias Audits Detect Bias but Disagree on Ranking: Evidence from Ten Instruments and Ten Frontier Models

The study evaluates ten bias audit instruments across ten advanced language models on occupational gender, age, and socioeconomic status. While each tool reliably detects bias, their rankings of model performance are essentially random, indicating that different audits measure distinct constructs. The findings show that a single audit can identify bias direction within its own framework, but no audit can consistently rank models against one another.

By William Guey, Pierrick Bougault, Wei Zhang, Vitor D. de Moura, Jos\'e O. Gomes
arXiv AI
2d ago

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
Sep 10

PopResume: Causal Fairness Evaluation of LLM/VLM Resume Screeners with Population-Representative Dataset

PopResume is a population‑representative resume dataset designed for causal fairness auditing of large language model (LLM) and vision‑language model (VLM) resume screeners. It grounds fairness evaluation in real population statistics and preserves natural attribute relationships, enabling path‑specific effect (PSE) analysis that separates business‑necessity from redlining pathways. Using PopResume, the authors evaluated eight models on 60.8K resumes across five occupations and uncovered five discrimination patterns that aggregate metrics missed, demonstrating the value of causally‑grounded auditing.

By Sumin Yu, Juhyeon Park, Taesup Moon
arXiv AI
Aug 17

Whose doctor does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation and demographic signals in large language model-assisted physician choice

arXiv:2608. 14399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Patients increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which doctor to see, making these systems AI infomediaries: algorithms that intermediate one person's choice among other people and thereby decide, silently and at scale, which physicians become visible.

By Syeda Anshrah Gillani, Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Disentangling Algorithmic Bias from Archival Artifacts: A Controlled Audit of Vision-Language Model Valuation in Metropolitan Museum Archives

The paper audits vision‑language models (CLIP) for gender bias using 1,500 artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, focusing on zero‑shot logit differences for prompts like "masterpiece," "quality," and "influence." Unadjusted results show no significant gender effect and statistical equivalence across models, but high residual variance suggests that global zero‑shot metrics are largely noise‑dominated and may miss fine‑grained biases. The study underscores the need for multivariate confound control, equivalence testing, and provenance auditing when evaluating AI fairness in cultural heritage data.

By Manpreet Singh, Rhythm Bhatia, Rahul Joshi
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Counterfactual Bias Testing for Application Tracking System

The paper proposes a scalable, automated method for auditing candidate‑job matching systems for demographic bias. It employs large‑language‑model agents to generate neutral resumes, injects controlled demographic variations, ranks candidates with a fine‑tuned embedding model, and evaluates nine fairness metrics across counterfactual, group‑fairness, and merit‑aware families, producing a composite risk report. Experiments on a small corpus show that single‑score audits miss nuanced issues, underscoring the need for multi‑metric evaluation and LLM‑generated audits as a low‑cost complement to human reviews.

By Sai Yashwant, Shruti Bansal, Anurag Dubey, Samaroha Chatterjee, Satyam Kumar, Shreyash Gupta, Gantala Thulsiram