arXiv Computation and Language By Kalyan Bhetwal, Ceren Mert, Ian Whitehouse

Name-Bias in Large Language Models

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The study evaluates name-based bias in six local large language models using a fill-in-the-blank task with first names from U.S. Social Security and a race classification dataset. Across 300,000 responses, the models consistently favored names that were less stereotypically male, older, popular, and white, with gender bias being the strongest effect. The bias varied with sentence context but remained significant, underscoring the persistence of name bias in local LLMs.

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