Almost every large language model that reaches a broad audience is quantized: trained in full precision, then compressed for efficiency. This step is assumed harmless and its safety is rarely re-checked.
The paper examines how automated safety systems unevenly flag harmful content, disproportionately labeling African American English as offensive and misclassifying content from drag queens and white nationalists. It identifies seven failure modes rooted in vocabulary-based harm detection and proposes an evaluation protocol that highlights gaps in performance across languages. Applied to five open systems in eleven languages, the study finds that none achieve native-speaker accuracy, and higher capability often increases discrimination, widening the disparity between best- and worst-served language communities.
By Gabriel Lars Sabadin, Dr Nicola Harding, Sarah Kingston
The paper introduces a novel framework for assessing second‑order bias in large language models (LLMs), defined as bias in how an LLM judges the acceptability of biased content. Using principles from entitlement epistemology, the authors design a reasoning task that asks LLMs to determine whether a biased text is acceptable for specific demographic groups, and propose two metrics to quantify biased judgments. Experiments on both open‑source and closed‑source models reveal that the task bypasses safety guardrails, uncovers systematic variations across target groups, and demonstrates that models still rely on demographic labels when evaluating bias.
By Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Raiyan Ahmed, Zhijing Jin, Shion Guha, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
arXiv:2608. 07762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM benchmarks can build an organization's reputation and attract customers, but only when results are transparent and verifiable.
By Sahil Pardasani, Madhusudan Singh
arXiv:2610.15961v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) occurs when fine-tuning a language model to a narrow task makes it misaligned on unrelated ones. Because organizations now...
By Alex Mart\'i Guiu, Nicolas Zumarraga, Kevin O'Sullivan, Robert Jakob, Anna Hedstr\"om
arXiv:2609.00222v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for subjective tasks, where annotators disagree and the relevant question is not only how...
By Daniela Occhipinti, Andrea Piergentili, Marco Guerini