Social Bias in Language Models

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Overview

This topic studies how language models reflect or produce social disparities tied to traits such as gender, race, disability, religion, class, and language variety, in both text generation and consequential tasks. Researchers use counterfactual prompts, stereotype and decision-making benchmarks, human and community judgments, and audits across languages, dialects, modalities, and multi-turn interactions. Mitigation approaches include data augmentation and fine-tuning, prompting and retrieval, decoding-time controls, and interventions on model weights or internal representations. A central challenge is that measured bias changes with the task and context, while interventions can reduce visible disparities without removing underlying associations or can shift harms and degrade useful capabilities.

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199 papers21 papers in the last four weeks, down 9% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. RAGing Against Misogyny: Improving Implicit Misogyny Explanations

    Oct 26, 2026Ivana Crescenzi, Arianna Muti, Maarten Sap +2Implicit BiasSocial Bias in Language Models

    Department of Computing Sciences, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy · Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA · Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

  2. How Does Post-Training Shape LLM Value Preferences?

    Oct 23, 2026Yang Liu, Shaoyang Xu, Masahiro Kaneko +3LLM Post-TrainingSocial Bias in Language Models

    Kyoto University · Singapore University of Technology and Design · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

  3. Investigating the Impact of Learner Errors on Social Bias in Large Language Models

    Oct 21, 2026Federico Marcuzzi, Martin Christoph, Iryna Gurevych +1Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria · Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab), Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt and National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, Germany · Department of Computer Science at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), United States

  4. Effects of Model Scale and Quantization on Social Bias and Abstention in Question Answering

    Oct 21, 2026Kuniko Paxton, Ifeoluwa Wuraola, Dhavalkumar ThakkerSocial Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Hull Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX, United Kingdom

  5. Beyond Model Weights: Sampling-Dependent Fairness in Diffusion Language Models

    Oct 20, 2026Koshiro Saito, Daisuke Oba, Danushka Bollegala +1Social Bias in Language ModelsDiffusion Language Models

    Institute of Science Tokyo · University of Liverpool · Amazon +2

  6. Do LLMs Really Lack Difference Awareness? Uncovering Heuristic Substitution in Group-Differentiating Fairness

    Oct 18, 2026Jingshen Zhang, Bo Wang, Yanlin Fu +4Algorithmic FairnessSocial Bias in Language Models

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University · QMindTech · Department of Nuclear Science and Technology, Fudan University +1

  7. Cultural (In)Competence: Investigating Culture-Specific Stereotype Detection Capabilities of LLMs

    Oct 15, 2026Maximilian Spliethöver, Jannes Lötfering, Dominik Bachmann +4Social Bias in Language ModelsCultural Bias in Language Models

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence & L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover · Institute for Logic, Language & Computation, University of Amsterdam · Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University

  8. Name-Bias in Large Language Models

    Oct 15, 2026Kalyan Bhetwal, Ceren Mert, Ian WhitehouseSocial Bias in Language ModelsDemographic Bias in Language Models

    University of Maryland, College Park, USA

  9. Resisting Harmful Instructions through Training-Free Weight Editing

    Oct 15, 2026Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Xiaocong Yang, Samuel Schapiro +4LLM SafetyLLM Safety Alignment

  10. A Global View of How LLMs Value Human Time

    Oct 13, 2026Yifan He, Manon Reusens, Sofie Goethals +1Jurisdictional Bias in Language ModelsCross-Cultural Language Model Evaluation

  11. Social Priors: Descriptions of AI Users Shape How Language Models Trust and Cooperate

    Oct 12, 2026Harsh Kumar, George Eilender, Ashton AndersonSocial Bias in Language ModelsBelief Updating in LLMs

    Department of Computer Science University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

  12. AI Representations of Mental Health Stigma: Quantifying the Gap Between AI Estimations and Human Perceptions Across Gender Groups Using GPT-Based LLMs

    Oct 12, 2026Soojong Kim, Hye Min Kim, Kwanho Kim +1Social Bias in Language ModelsGender Bias in Language Models

    Department of Communication, University of California Davis, United States · Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts Boston, United States · Department of Media, College of Politics and Economics, Kyung Hee University, South Korea

  13. Social Bias in Chinese Large Language Models under Social Media Expressions

    Oct 10, 2026Mo ZhouSocial Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    School of Chinese Language and Literature, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing 210000, China

  14. Personalization Without Stereotyping: Do Speech LLMs Know When to Turn a Deaf Ear?

    Oct 9, 2026Kshitij Ambilduke, Caroline Brun, Thibaut Thonet +2Social Bias in Language ModelsSpeech Language Models

    Université Paris-Saclay, France · NAVER LABS Europe, France

  15. The "10th Juror": Open-Set Standpoint Screening for Bureaucratic Bias Detection

    Oct 8, 2026Yuchen Miao, Zijun Wang, Chang Han +3Social Bias in Language ModelsLegal NLP

    Sydney Smart Technology College, Northeastern University, China · Taiyuan University of Technology · School of Resources, Environment and Materials, Guangxi University +1

  16. Why LLM Agents Favor Their Group: Stakes, Observed Norms, and Reputation

    Oct 7, 2026Yujiao ChenSocial Bias in Language ModelsNormative Conformity in Language Models

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Primitive Labs

  17. The Missing Minimal Pair: Stereotype Evaluation in LLMs

    Oct 6, 2026Nataliya Stepanova, Ivan Titov, Emily Allaway +1Multilingual Language Model EvaluationSocial Bias in Language Models

    University of Edinburgh · University of Amsterdam

  18. Latent space bias directions in LLMs capture confidence, not fairness

    Oct 6, 2026Stephanie Buttigieg, Maeve Madigan, Parameswaran Kamalaruban +1Debiased MLLanguage Model Steering

    Institute of Astronomy & Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, UK · Risk and Security AI Lab, Visa Inc., Cambridge, UK

  19. FORGE: Verification-Gated Behavioral Repair for Generative Language Models

    Oct 4, 2026Hsin-Ling Hsu, Min-Yu Chen, Nai-Chia Chen +3Social Bias in Language ModelsLLM Safety

    Department of Management Information Systems National Chengchi University Taipei, Taiwan

  20. Collective Bias Mitigation via Model Routing and Collaboration

    Oct 2, 2026Mingzhe Du, Luu Anh Tuan, Xiaobao Wu +7Social Bias in Language ModelsDemographic Bias in Language Models

    Nanyang Technological University · National University of Singapore · Harbin Institute of Technology +1

  21. Acmite: Mitigating Gender Bias in LLMs through Concept-Guided Mutual Information

    Oct 1, 2026Tian Lan, Xiaoqing Cheng, Han Zhang +1Gender Bias in Language ModelsDebiased ML

    Kyoto University · Zhejiang University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1

  22. Debias It Yourself: Teaching LLMs Cognitive Bias Mitigation Interventions

    Sep 30, 2026Chahat Raj, Sina Mansouri, Aylin Caliskan +2Cognitive Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Debiasing

    George Mason University · University of Washington

  23. LLMs Trust Their Own: Identity-Dependent Conformity in Multi-Agent Systems

    Sep 27, 2026Liron Soffer, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Chen ShaniNormative Conformity in Language ModelsSocial Bias in Language Models

    Tel-Aviv University · New York University

  24. Does Thinking Help Fairness? Reasoning Tokens Resolve Some Biases but Create More

    Sep 25, 2026Deng Pan, Joe Germino, Yihong Ma +4Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Notre Dame · IBM Research, Dublin

  25. Some Dialects Are More Equal Than Others: Non-Prestigious Arabic Dialectal Bias in LLMs

    Sep 21, 2026Mai Mohamed Eida, Ryan Dolan, Paul de Nijs +1Dialect Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

  26. FairLMs: A Turnkey Library for Fairness in Language Models

    Sep 18, 2026Jiale Zhang, Michael Larionov, Zichong Wang +2Language Model Bias EvaluationSocial Bias in Language Models

    Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science Indiana University Indianapolis, IN, United States · Department of Statistics and Data Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, United States · Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences Florida International University Miami, FL, United States

  27. DyMT-ESB: Dynamic Multi-Turn Evaluation of Social Bias in User-LLM Interactions

    Sep 16, 2026Rem Hida, Masahiro Kaneko, Daisuke Oba +2Social Bias in Language ModelsMulti-Turn Dialogue Evaluation

    Institute of Science Tokyo · MBZUAI · Third Intelligence +1

  28. Bias Amplification in Multi-Agent Network: How Biased Agents Shape Opinions and Rhetoric

    Sep 16, 2026Omran Berjawi, Giuseppe Fenza, Rida KhatounOpinion DynamicsSocial Bias in Language Models

    Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Télécom Paris, Palaiseau, France · University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

  29. From a River in Gilead to the Inference Distributions of Large Language Models: Covert Dialect Bias and Linguistic Profiling at Scale

    Sep 16, 2026Chowdhury Mohammad Abdullah, Rita OrjiSocial Bias in Language ModelsDialect Bias in Language Models

    Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University Halifax, NS, Canada

  30. One Example Is Enough to Pass Fairness Benchmarks: Rethinking Fairness Evaluation for Aligned LLMs

    Sep 14, 2026Naihao Deng, Samee Arif, Shuaichen Chang +2LLM EvaluationLLM Alignment

    University of Michigan · The Ohio State University · University of Aberdeen +1