arXiv:2608. 19670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) compression reduces deployment costs, but standard aggregate metrics like perplexity and accuracy often mask underlying behavioral shifts.
By Yuan Wu, Mairui Li, Lesia Semenova, Chudi Zhong
Post‑training quantization of large language models reduces memory usage but can alter social biases in ways that aggregate metrics miss. In a large‑scale study of 50 quantized models on PostTrainingBiasBench, the authors discovered a phenomenon called quantization‑induced bias flipping, where up to 21% of responses switch from biased to unbiased or vice versa, especially for uncertain predictions and stronger quantization (4‑bit vs 8‑bit). These flips lead to asymmetric impacts across demographic groups, with some groups experiencing up to an 18.6% worsening of bias while others improve by 14.1%, resulting in misleadingly neutral overall scores.
By Stanley Z. Hua, Sanae Lotfi, Irene Y. Chen
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.
By An Vo, Vy Tuong Dang, Khai-Nguyen Nguyen, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Thamar Solorio, Anh Totti Nguyen, Daeyoung Kim
arXiv:2610.08559v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Activation steering has gained popularity as a lightweight inference-time debiasing technique for large language models. However, prior work reports...
By Stephanie Buttigieg, Maeve Madigan, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Stuart Burrell
The paper introduces AttriBench, a benchmark dataset that balances author fame and demographics to study quote attribution in large language models (LLMs). Using AttriBench, the authors evaluate 11 popular LLMs and find that accurate attribution remains difficult, with significant disparities across race, gender, and intersectional groups. They also identify a new failure mode—suppression—where models omit attribution entirely, which is unevenly distributed across demographics and not reflected by standard accuracy metrics.
By Eliza Berman, Bella Chang, Daniel B. Neill, Emily Black
arXiv:2607. 18269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The wisdom of crowds -- the finding that aggregating judgments across individuals often outperforms the best individual -- has been extensively studied with human forecasters.
By Igor Douven