Do LLMs Really Lack Difference Awareness? Uncovering Heuristic Substitution in Group-Differentiating Fairness
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) truly lack awareness of meaningful differences between social groups in fairness decisions. It proposes that instead of lacking difference awareness, LLMs often substitute a simpler equal‑treatment heuristic, a phenomenon called Fairness Heuristic Substitution. The authors introduce a Two‑stage Distinguish‑Decide (TDD) framework that separates the identification of relevant group differences from the fairness decision, and show that TDD outperforms one‑stage baselines across multiple benchmarks and models, while also revealing mechanistic evidence for the heuristic substitution hypothesis.
Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.