arXiv Computation and Language September 11, 2026 By Nour Bouchouchi, Thibault Laugel, Xavier Renard, Christophe Marsala, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Marcin Detyniecki

Alignment Reduces Expressed but Not Encoded Gender Bias: A Unified Framework and Study

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper introduces a unified framework that simultaneously measures intrinsic (encoded) and extrinsic (expressed) gender bias in large language models using identical neutral prompts. It finds a consistent link between latent gender information and output bias, but shows that alignment via supervised fine‑tuning reduces expressed bias while leaving internal gender associations largely intact and reactivatable by adversarial prompts. The study also demonstrates that debiasing gains on structured benchmarks may not transfer to realistic tasks such as story generation.

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