FairFund-Bench: Evaluating Distributive Bias in LLM Resource Allocation

Whether a language model looks demographically biased can depend on how the audit asks its question. A charitable-aid benchmark reports that the same models favor minority applicants when rating requests one at a time and penalize some when ranking side by side. We test whether that reversal generalizes to hiring, lending, and medical triage: 40,726 requests to five models, applications differing only in the applicant's name, and a primary test fixed before collection. It does not. None of 36 planned contrasts survives correction. The rating advantage keeps its sign at roughly half the published size, and a precision extension bounds any hiring ranking penalty below the published effect, though the lending and triage ranking floors sit above that margin, so the exclusion is conclusive for hiring ranking and for rating in all three domains only. Planted disparities tracking their injected sizes and a directional replication on the original aid materials bound these nulls. The audit is livelier than the demographics: models recognize transparent audits nearly always, tie every identical-content comparison whether the varying detail is race or a hobby, and reward first-listed candidates as much as any demographic effect we measure. Audit verdicts reflect audit construction more than demographic bias.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit systematic biases across demographic groups. Auditing is proposed as an accountability tool for black-box LLM applications, but suffers from resource-intensive query access. We conceptualise auditing as uncertainty estimation over a target fairness metric and introduce BAFA, the Bounded Active Fairness Auditor for query-efficient auditing of black-box LLMs. BAFA maintains a version space of surrogate models consistent with queried scores and computes uncertainty intervals for fairness metrics (e.g., $Δ$ AUC) via constrained empirical risk minimisation. Active query selection narrows these intervals to reduce estimation error. We evaluate BAFA on two standard fairness dataset case studies: \textsc{CivilComments} and \textsc{Bias-in-Bios}, comparing against stratified sampling, power sampling, and ablations. BAFA achieves target error thresholds with up to 40$\times$ fewer queries than stratified sampling (e.g., 144 vs 5,956 queries at $\varepsilon=0.02$ for \textsc{CivilComments}) for tight thresholds, demonstrates substantially better performance over time, and shows lower variance across runs. These results suggest that active sampling can reduce resources needed for independent fairness auditing with LLMs, supporting continuous model evaluations.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly take actions (screening applicants, recommending credit, triaging patients), yet fairness for LLMs is still measured by grading answers. We introduce AgentFairBench, a cheap, reproducible, multi-domain benchmark for demographic disparity in the actions of LLM agents. Grounded in a companion framework, the Bias Conduction Framework (BCF, restated here), it spans three regulator-anchored domains: hiring, lending, and medical triage. Synthetic, demographic-neutral profiles are evaluated in counterfactual matched sets that vary only a name-coded race x gender signal (in the Bertrand Mullainathan tradition), under four agent scaffolds of increasing agency (direct, chain-of-thought, multi-agent deliberation, tool-augmented). A NumPy-only harness computes counterfactual flip rate, mean absolute score difference (MASD), action-rate disparity, and tool-invocation disparity, with bootstrap confidence intervals, paired tests, and false-discovery-rate control, for single-digit dollars per model. A live leaderboard with a held-out private split and a contamination canary admits external models by submission. Our pilot (864 decisions plus a test-retest replication) carries a methodological lesson: comparing a six-group score spread against a two-run noise difference overstates disparity by ~ 2.4X through statistic arity alone. Against an arity matched noise floor and an omnibus group test, claude haiku 4 5 shows no demographic effect above sampling noise (0 of 120 pairwise and 0 of 9 omnibus contrasts survive correction); a planted-bias test confirms the instrument detects disparity when present. The contribution is a sound, sensitive, adoption-ready instrument, the arity matched null methodology, and open artifacts to scale it. Code, data, and harness are released under open licenses, with an anonymized review artifact.