Latent space bias directions in LLMs capture confidence, not fairness
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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The paper introduces a bias depth score to differentiate between stable model preferences (Deep biases) and prompt‑dependent responses (Shallow biases) in large language models. By analyzing 4,442 opinion prompts across four models, it finds that only about a quarter of concentrated preferences persist after scenario reframing, indicating that most are shallow. The study shows Deep biases are more often inherited from pretraining and harder to remove through fine‑tuning or prompt‑based debiasing, highlighting the need to distinguish learned biases from prompt artifacts.
BiasGym is a cost‑effective, generalizable framework that injects specific biases into large language models via token‑based fine‑tuning while keeping the model frozen. It then uses two debiasing methods—Scope and Steer—to identify and suppress or redirect the components responsible for biased behavior. The framework enables consistent bias elicitation, precise localization of bias associations, and targeted debiasing without harming downstream performance, and it has been shown to reduce real‑world stereotypes such as labeling Italians as reckless drivers.
arXiv:2608. 05166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an evaluation of cognitive bias expression in state-of-the-art instruction-tuned LLMs under realistic multi-turn interaction settings.
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
arXiv:2509. 03647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models.
arXiv:2607. 28319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents Fairness Pruning, a lightweight structural intervention method designed for the management and future mitigation of demographic bias in large language models (LLMs).