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.

Latest papers

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

  1. Cross-Lingual Sentiment Misalignment: Auditing Multilingual Language Models for Inversion Risk, Dialectal Representation, and Affective Stability

    Feb 19, 2026Nusrat Jahan Lia, Shubhashis Roy DiptaDialect Bias in Language ModelsCross-Lingual Consistency in Language Models

    Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh · University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

  2. Counterfactual Fairness Evaluation of LLM-Based Contact Center Agent Quality Assurance System

    Feb 16, 2026Kawin Mayilvaghanan, Siddhant Gupta, Ayush KumarLanguage Model Bias EvaluationDemographic Bias in Language Models

    Observe.AI Bangalore, India

  3. Robust Bias Evaluation with FilBBQ: A Filipino Bias Benchmark for Question-Answering Language Models

    Feb 16, 2026Lance Calvin Lim Gamboa, Yue Feng, Mark LeeSocial Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham · Department of Information Systems and Computer Science, Ateneo de Manila University

  4. Investigating Social Bias Changes in Quantized Language Models

    Feb 5, 2026Stanley Z. Hua, Sanae Lotfi, Irene Y. ChenLLM QuantizationSocial Bias in Language Models

    UC Berkeley & UCSF · Meta Superintelligence Labs

  5. Knowing Bias, Doing Better: Mitigating Social Bias in LLMs via Know-Bias Neuron Enhancement

    Jan 29, 2026Jinhao Pan, Chahat Raj, Anjishnu Mukherjee +4Debiased MLSocial Bias in Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA · Lightridge High School, Aldie, VA, USA

  6. White-Box Sensitivity Auditing with Steering Vectors

    Jan 23, 2026Hannah Cyberey, Yangfeng Ji, David EvansAlgorithmic AuditingLLM Auditing

    University of Virginia

  7. Large Language Models Develop Novel Social Biases Through Adaptive Exploration

    Nov 8, 2025Addison J. Wu, Ryan Liu, Xuechunzi Bai +1Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    1Princeton University · University

  8. Adaptive Generation of Bias-Eliciting Questions for LLMs

    Oct 14, 2025Robin Staab, Jasper Dekoninck, Maximilian Baader +1Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    1ETH Zurich, Switzerland · 2Snyk, Zurich, Switzerland

  9. ABLEIST: Intersectional Disability Bias in LLM-Generated Hiring Scenarios

    Oct 13, 2025Mahika Phutane, Hayoung Jung, Matthew Kim +2Intersectional Bias in Language ModelsSocial Bias in Language Models

    Cornell University · Princeton University · University of Washington

  10. Fair-GPTQ: Bias-Aware Quantization for Large Language Models

    Sep 18, 2025Irina Proskurina, Guillaume Metzler, Julien VelcinLLM QuantizationSocial Bias in Language Models

    Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Université Lumière Lyon 2, ERIC · École Centrale de Lyon, LIRIS, CNRS UMR 5205

  11. BiasGym: A Simple and Generalizable Framework for Analyzing and Removing Biases through Injection

    Aug 12, 2025Sekh Mainul Islam, Nadav Borenstein, Siddhesh Milind Pawar +3Social Bias in Language ModelsLLM Interpretability

    University of Copenhagen

  12. Unequal Voices: How LLMs Construct Constrained Queer Narratives

    Jul 21, 2025Atreya Ghosal, Ashim Gupta, Vivek SrikumarSocial Bias in Language ModelsDemographic Bias in Language Models

    University of Utah

  13. From Individuals to Interactions: Benchmarking Gender Bias in Multimodal Large Language Models from the Lens of Social Relationship

    Jun 29, 2025Yue Xu, Wenjie WangNarrative GenerationSocial Bias in Language Models

    School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University

  14. FairCoder: Probing LLM Bias in High-Stakes Decision Making via Coding Tasks

    Jan 9, 2025Yongkang Du, Jen-tse Huang, Jieyu Zhao +1Social Bias in Language ModelsAlgorithmic Fairness

    Pennsylvania State University · University of Southern California

  15. Homogeneity Bias in Open-Weight LLMs Is Robust to Decoding Hyperparameters

    Jan 4, 2025Messi H. J. LeeSocial Bias in Language ModelsOpen-Weight Language Models

    Independent Researcher · Seoul, Republic of Korea

  16. BTBR: A Bayesian-Theory-Driven Probabilistic-Fuzzy Framework for Implicit Bias Removal in Large Language Models

    Aug 20, 2024Yongxin Deng, Xiaoyu Tan, Jing Pan +3Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Technology Sydney · School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia · National University of Singapore +3

  17. BA-LoRA: Bias-Alleviating Low-Rank Adaptation to Mitigate Catastrophic Inheritance in Large Language Models

    Aug 8, 2024Yupeng Chang, Yi Chang, Yuan WuSocial Bias in Language ModelsLow-Rank Adaptation

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University · Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering, Jilin University · International Center of Future Science, Jilin University

  18. Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained

    Jul 26, 2024Zhipeng Yin, Zichong Wang, Avash Palikhe +1Social Bias in Language ModelsDemographic Bias in Language Models

    Florida International University, Miami, USA

  19. MBBQ: A Dataset for Cross-Lingual Comparison of Stereotypes in Generative LLMs

    Jun 11, 2024Vera Neplenbroek, Arianna Bisazza, Raquel FernándezSocial Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam · Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen

  20. General Phrase Debiaser: Debiasing Masked Language Models at a Multi-Token Level

    Nov 23, 2023Bingkang Shi, Xiaodan Zhang, Dehan Kong +4Gender Bias in Language ModelsDebiased ML

    Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Information Engineering, Beijing 100093, China · Alibaba Group, Alibaba Artificial Intelligence Governance Laboratory, Beijing, China · University of Bristol, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Bristol, BS8 1UB, UK