Daily Papers

The rapid development in large language models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of natural language processing and understanding (NLP/NLU), offering significant benefits across various domains. However, when applied to scientific research, these powerful models exhibit critical failure modes related to scientific integrity and trustworthiness. Existing general-purpose LLM guardrails are insufficient to address these unique challenges in the scientific domain. We provide comprehensive guidelines for deploying LLM guardrails in the scientific domain. We identify specific challenges -- including time sensitivity, knowledge contextualization, conflict resolution, and intellectual property concerns -- and propose a guideline framework for the guardrails that can align with scientific needs. These guardrail dimensions include trustworthiness, ethics & bias, safety, and legal aspects. We also outline in detail the implementation strategies that employ white-box, black-box, and gray-box methodologies that can be enforced within scientific contexts.

In this research, we introduce BEATS, a novel framework for evaluating Bias, Ethics, Fairness, and Factuality in Large Language Models (LLMs). Building upon the BEATS framework, we present a bias benchmark for LLMs that measure performance across 29 distinct metrics. These metrics span a broad range of characteristics, including demographic, cognitive, and social biases, as well as measures of ethical reasoning, group fairness, and factuality related misinformation risk. These metrics enable a quantitative assessment of the extent to which LLM generated responses may perpetuate societal prejudices that reinforce or expand systemic inequities. To achieve a high score on this benchmark a LLM must show very equitable behavior in their responses, making it a rigorous standard for responsible AI evaluation. Empirical results based on data from our experiment show that, 37.65\% of outputs generated by industry leading models contained some form of bias, highlighting a substantial risk of using these models in critical decision making systems. BEATS framework and benchmark offer a scalable and statistically rigorous methodology to benchmark LLMs, diagnose factors driving biases, and develop mitigation strategies. With the BEATS framework, our goal is to help the development of more socially responsible and ethically aligned AI models.

AI systems for high quality music generation typically rely on extremely large musical datasets to train the AI models. This creates barriers to generating music beyond the genres represented in dominant datasets such as Western Classical music or pop music. We undertook a 4 month international research project summarised in this paper to explore the eXplainable AI (XAI) challenges and opportunities associated with reducing barriers to using marginalised genres of music with AI models. XAI opportunities identified included topics of improving transparency and control of AI models, explaining the ethics and bias of AI models, fine tuning large models with small datasets to reduce bias, and explaining style-transfer opportunities with AI models. Participants in the research emphasised that whilst it is hard to work with small datasets such as marginalised music and AI, such approaches strengthen cultural representation of underrepresented cultures and contribute to addressing issues of bias of deep learning models. We are now building on this project to bring together a global International Responsible AI Music community and invite people to join our network.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) for healthcare applications has spurred calls for holistic evaluation beyond frequently-cited benchmarks like USMLE, to better reflect real-world performance. While real-world assessments are valuable indicators of utility, they often lag behind the pace of LLM evolution, likely rendering findings obsolete upon deployment. This temporal disconnect necessitates a comprehensive upfront evaluation that can guide model selection for specific clinical applications. We introduce MEDIC, a framework assessing LLMs across five critical dimensions of clinical competence: medical reasoning, ethics and bias, data and language understanding, in-context learning, and clinical safety. MEDIC features a novel cross-examination framework quantifying LLM performance across areas like coverage and hallucination detection, without requiring reference outputs. We apply MEDIC to evaluate LLMs on medical question-answering, safety, summarization, note generation, and other tasks. Our results show performance disparities across model sizes, baseline vs medically finetuned models, and have implications on model selection for applications requiring specific model strengths, such as low hallucination or lower cost of inference. MEDIC's multifaceted evaluation reveals these performance trade-offs, bridging the gap between theoretical capabilities and practical implementation in healthcare settings, ensuring that the most promising models are identified and adapted for diverse healthcare applications.

As the capabilities of generative language models continue to advance, the implications of biases ingrained within these models have garnered increasing attention from researchers, practitioners, and the broader public. This article investigates the challenges and risks associated with biases in large-scale language models like ChatGPT. We discuss the origins of biases, stemming from, among others, the nature of training data, model specifications, algorithmic constraints, product design, and policy decisions. We explore the ethical concerns arising from the unintended consequences of biased model outputs. We further analyze the potential opportunities to mitigate biases, the inevitability of some biases, and the implications of deploying these models in various applications, such as virtual assistants, content generation, and chatbots. Finally, we review the current approaches to identify, quantify, and mitigate biases in language models, emphasizing the need for a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort to develop more equitable, transparent, and responsible AI systems. This article aims to stimulate a thoughtful dialogue within the artificial intelligence community, encouraging researchers and developers to reflect on the role of biases in generative language models and the ongoing pursuit of ethical AI.

With the introduction of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have received enormous attention in healthcare. Despite their potential benefits, researchers have underscored various ethical implications. While individual instances have drawn much attention, the debate lacks a systematic overview of practical applications currently researched and ethical issues connected to them. Against this background, this work aims to map the ethical landscape surrounding the current stage of deployment of LLMs in medicine and healthcare. Electronic databases and preprint servers were queried using a comprehensive search strategy. Studies were screened and extracted following a modified rapid review approach. Methodological quality was assessed using a hybrid approach. For 53 records, a meta-aggregative synthesis was performed. Four fields of applications emerged and testify to a vivid exploration phase. Advantages of using LLMs are attributed to their capacity in data analysis, personalized information provisioning, support in decision-making, mitigating information loss and enhancing information accessibility. However, we also identifies recurrent ethical concerns connected to fairness, bias, non-maleficence, transparency, and privacy. A distinctive concern is the tendency to produce harmful misinformation or convincingly but inaccurate content. A recurrent plea for ethical guidance and human oversight is evident. Given the variety of use cases, it is suggested that the ethical guidance debate be reframed to focus on defining what constitutes acceptable human oversight across the spectrum of applications. This involves considering diverse settings, varying potentials for harm, and different acceptable thresholds for performance and certainty in healthcare. In addition, a critical inquiry is necessary to determine the extent to which the current experimental use of LLMs is necessary and justified.

In this paper, we cover approaches to systematically govern, assess and quantify bias across the complete life cycle of machine learning models, from initial development and validation to ongoing production monitoring and guardrail implementation. Building upon our foundational work on the Bias Evaluation and Assessment Test Suite (BEATS) for Large Language Models, the authors share prevalent bias and fairness related gaps in Large Language Models (LLMs) and discuss data and AI governance framework to address Bias, Ethics, Fairness, and Factuality within LLMs. The data and AI governance approach discussed in this paper is suitable for practical, real-world applications, enabling rigorous benchmarking of LLMs prior to production deployment, facilitating continuous real-time evaluation, and proactively governing LLM generated responses. By implementing the data and AI governance across the life cycle of AI development, organizations can significantly enhance the safety and responsibility of their GenAI systems, effectively mitigating risks of discrimination and protecting against potential reputational or brand-related harm. Ultimately, through this article, we aim to contribute to advancement of the creation and deployment of socially responsible and ethically aligned generative artificial intelligence powered applications.

Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) have permitted the synthesis and comprehension of coherent text in an open-ended way, therefore translating the theoretical algorithms into practical applications. The large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted businesses such as report summarization software and copywriters. Observations indicate, however, that LLMs may exhibit social prejudice and toxicity, posing ethical and societal dangers of consequences resulting from irresponsibility. Large-scale benchmarks for accountable LLMs should consequently be developed. Although several empirical investigations reveal the existence of a few ethical difficulties in advanced LLMs, there is little systematic examination and user study of the risks and harmful behaviors of current LLM usage. To further educate future efforts on constructing ethical LLMs responsibly, we perform a qualitative research method called ``red teaming'' on OpenAI's ChatGPTIn this paper, ChatGPT refers to the version released on Dec 15th. to better understand the practical features of ethical dangers in recent LLMs. We analyze ChatGPT comprehensively from four perspectives: 1) Bias 2) Reliability 3) Robustness 4) Toxicity. In accordance with our stated viewpoints, we empirically benchmark ChatGPT on multiple sample datasets. We find that a significant number of ethical risks cannot be addressed by existing benchmarks, and hence illustrate them via additional case studies. In addition, we examine the implications of our findings on AI ethics and harmal behaviors of ChatGPT, as well as future problems and practical design considerations for responsible LLMs. We believe that our findings may give light on future efforts to determine and mitigate the ethical hazards posed by machines in LLM applications.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more prevalent, concerns about their safety, ethics, and potential biases have risen. Systematically evaluating LLMs' risk decision-making tendencies and attitudes, particularly in the ethical domain, has become crucial. This study innovatively applies the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale from cognitive science to LLMs and proposes a novel Ethical Decision-Making Risk Attitude Scale (EDRAS) to assess LLMs' ethical risk attitudes in depth. We further propose a novel approach integrating risk scales and role-playing to quantitatively evaluate systematic biases in LLMs. Through systematic evaluation and analysis of multiple mainstream LLMs, we assessed the "risk personalities" of LLMs across multiple domains, with a particular focus on the ethical domain, and revealed and quantified LLMs' systematic biases towards different groups. This research helps understand LLMs' risk decision-making and ensure their safe and reliable application. Our approach provides a tool for identifying and mitigating biases, contributing to fairer and more trustworthy AI systems. The code and data are available.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are in a period of astounding growth. However, there are concerns that these technologies may be used, either with or without intention, to perpetuate the prejudice and unfairness that unfortunately characterizes many human institutions. Here we show for the first time that human-like semantic biases result from the application of standard machine learning to ordinary language---the same sort of language humans are exposed to every day. We replicate a spectrum of standard human biases as exposed by the Implicit Association Test and other well-known psychological studies. We replicate these using a widely used, purely statistical machine-learning model---namely, the GloVe word embedding---trained on a corpus of text from the Web. Our results indicate that language itself contains recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether these are morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as towards race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the {\em status quo} for the distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. These regularities are captured by machine learning along with the rest of semantics. In addition to our empirical findings concerning language, we also contribute new methods for evaluating bias in text, the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) and the Word Embedding Factual Association Test (WEFAT). Our results have implications not only for AI and machine learning, but also for the fields of psychology, sociology, and human ethics, since they raise the possibility that mere exposure to everyday language can account for the biases we replicate here.

Text-to-image diffusion models are a class of deep generative models that have demonstrated an impressive capacity for high-quality image generation. However, these models are susceptible to implicit biases that arise from web-scale text-image training pairs and may inaccurately model aspects of images we care about. This can result in suboptimal samples, model bias, and images that do not align with human ethics and preferences. In this paper, we present an effective scalable algorithm to improve diffusion models using Reinforcement Learning (RL) across a diverse set of reward functions, such as human preference, compositionality, and fairness over millions of images. We illustrate how our approach substantially outperforms existing methods for aligning diffusion models with human preferences. We further illustrate how this substantially improves pretrained Stable Diffusion (SD) models, generating samples that are preferred by humans 80.3% of the time over those from the base SD model while simultaneously improving both the composition and diversity of generated samples.

As AI systems become increasingly powerful and pervasive, there are growing concerns about machines' morality or a lack thereof. Yet, teaching morality to machines is a formidable task, as morality remains among the most intensely debated questions in humanity, let alone for AI. Existing AI systems deployed to millions of users, however, are already making decisions loaded with moral implications, which poses a seemingly impossible challenge: teaching machines moral sense, while humanity continues to grapple with it. To explore this challenge, we introduce Delphi, an experimental framework based on deep neural networks trained directly to reason about descriptive ethical judgments, e.g., "helping a friend" is generally good, while "helping a friend spread fake news" is not. Empirical results shed novel insights on the promises and limits of machine ethics; Delphi demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in the face of novel ethical situations, while off-the-shelf neural network models exhibit markedly poor judgment including unjust biases, confirming the need for explicitly teaching machines moral sense. Yet, Delphi is not perfect, exhibiting susceptibility to pervasive biases and inconsistencies. Despite that, we demonstrate positive use cases of imperfect Delphi, including using it as a component model within other imperfect AI systems. Importantly, we interpret the operationalization of Delphi in light of prominent ethical theories, which leads us to important future research questions.

We investigate the impacts of NLP research published in top-tier conferences (i.e., ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL) from 1979 to 2024. By analyzing citations from research articles and external sources such as patents, media, and policy documents, we examine how different NLP topics are consumed both within the academic community and by the broader public. Our findings reveal that language modeling has the widest internal and external influence, while linguistic foundations have lower impacts. We also observe that internal and external impacts generally align, but topics like ethics, bias, and fairness show significant attention in policy documents with much fewer academic citations. Additionally, external domains exhibit distinct preferences, with patents focusing on practical NLP applications and media and policy documents engaging more with the societal implications of NLP models.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications to healthcare and finance - where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives - including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially due to the reason that GPT-4 follows the (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/.

Approaches to fair and ethical AI have recently fell under the scrutiny of the emerging, chiefly qualitative, field of critical data studies, placing emphasis on the lack of sensitivity to context and complex social phenomena of such interventions. We employ some of these lessons to introduce a tripartite decision-making toolkit, informed by dilemmas encountered in the pursuit of responsible AI/ML. These are: (a) the opportunity dilemma between the availability of data shaping problem statements vs problem statements shaping data; (b) the trade-off between scalability and contextualizability (too much data versus too specific data); and (c) the epistemic positioning between the pragmatic technical objectivism and the reflexive relativism in acknowledging the social. This paper advocates for a situated reasoning and creative engagement with the dilemmas surrounding responsible algorithmic/data-driven systems, and going beyond the formulaic bias elimination and ethics operationalization narratives found in the fair-AI literature.

Bias in textual data can lead to skewed interpretations and outcomes when the data is used. These biases could perpetuate stereotypes, discrimination, or other forms of unfair treatment. An algorithm trained on biased data may end up making decisions that disproportionately impact a certain group of people. Therefore, it is crucial to detect and remove these biases to ensure the fair and ethical use of data. To this end, we develop a comprehensive and robust framework NBIAS that consists of four main layers: data, corpus construction, model development and an evaluation layer. The dataset is constructed by collecting diverse data from various domains, including social media, healthcare, and job hiring portals. As such, we applied a transformer-based token classification model that is able to identify bias words/ phrases through a unique named entity BIAS. In the evaluation procedure, we incorporate a blend of quantitative and qualitative measures to gauge the effectiveness of our models. We achieve accuracy improvements ranging from 1% to 8% compared to baselines. We are also able to generate a robust understanding of the model functioning. The proposed approach is applicable to a variety of biases and contributes to the fair and ethical use of textual data.

In this position paper, we argue that instead of morally aligning LLMs to specific set of ethical principles, we should infuse generic ethical reasoning capabilities into them so that they can handle value pluralism at a global scale. When provided with an ethical policy, an LLM should be capable of making decisions that are ethically consistent to the policy. We develop a framework that integrates moral dilemmas with moral principles pertaining to different foramlisms of normative ethics, and at different levels of abstractions. Initial experiments with GPT-x models shows that while GPT-4 is a nearly perfect ethical reasoner, the models still have bias towards the moral values of Western and English speaking societies.

Ethical reasoning is a crucial skill for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, moral values are not universal, but rather influenced by language and culture. This paper explores how three prominent LLMs -- GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Llama2-70B-Chat -- perform ethical reasoning in different languages and if their moral judgement depend on the language in which they are prompted. We extend the study of ethical reasoning of LLMs by Rao et al. (2023) to a multilingual setup following their framework of probing LLMs with ethical dilemmas and policies from three branches of normative ethics: deontology, virtue, and consequentialism. We experiment with six languages: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Hindi, and Swahili. We find that GPT-4 is the most consistent and unbiased ethical reasoner across languages, while ChatGPT and Llama2-70B-Chat show significant moral value bias when we move to languages other than English. Interestingly, the nature of this bias significantly vary across languages for all LLMs, including GPT-4.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies should adhere to human norms to better serve our society and avoid disseminating harmful or misleading information, particularly in Conversational Information Retrieval (CIR). Previous work, including approaches and datasets, has not always been successful or sufficiently robust in taking human norms into consideration. To this end, we introduce a workflow that integrates ethical alignment, with an initial ethical judgment stage for efficient data screening. To address the need for ethical judgment in CIR, we present the QA-ETHICS dataset, adapted from the ETHICS benchmark, which serves as an evaluation tool by unifying scenarios and label meanings. However, each scenario only considers one ethical concept. Therefore, we introduce the MP-ETHICS dataset to evaluate a scenario under multiple ethical concepts, such as justice and Deontology. In addition, we suggest a new approach that achieves top performance in both binary and multi-label ethical judgment tasks. Our research provides a practical method for introducing ethical alignment into the CIR workflow. The data and code are available at https://github.com/wanng-ide/ealm .

The burgeoning landscape of text-to-image models, exemplified by innovations such as Midjourney and DALLE 3, has revolutionized content creation across diverse sectors. However, these advancements bring forth critical ethical concerns, particularly with the misuse of open-source models to generate content that violates societal norms. Addressing this, we introduce Ethical-Lens, a framework designed to facilitate the value-aligned usage of text-to-image tools without necessitating internal model revision. Ethical-Lens ensures value alignment in text-to-image models across toxicity and bias dimensions by refining user commands and rectifying model outputs. Systematic evaluation metrics, combining GPT4-V, HEIM, and FairFace scores, assess alignment capability. Our experiments reveal that Ethical-Lens enhances alignment capabilities to levels comparable with or superior to commercial models like DALLE 3, ensuring user-generated content adheres to ethical standards while maintaining image quality. This study indicates the potential of Ethical-Lens to ensure the sustainable development of open-source text-to-image tools and their beneficial integration into society. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuzhu-cai/Ethical-Lens.

This publication describes the motivation and generation of Q_{bias}, a large dataset of Google and Bing search queries, a scraping tool and dataset for biased news articles, as well as language models for the investigation of bias in online search. Web search engines are a major factor and trusted source in information search, especially in the political domain. However, biased information can influence opinion formation and lead to biased opinions. To interact with search engines, users formulate search queries and interact with search query suggestions provided by the search engines. A lack of datasets on search queries inhibits research on the subject. We use Q_{bias} to evaluate different approaches to fine-tuning transformer-based language models with the goal of producing models capable of biasing text with left and right political stance. Additionally to this work we provided datasets and language models for biasing texts that allow further research on bias in online information search.

The ethical concept of fairness has recently been applied in machine learning (ML) settings to describe a wide range of constraints and objectives. When considering the relevance of ethical concepts to subset selection problems, the concepts of diversity and inclusion are additionally applicable in order to create outputs that account for social power and access differentials. We introduce metrics based on these concepts, which can be applied together, separately, and in tandem with additional fairness constraints. Results from human subject experiments lend support to the proposed criteria. Social choice methods can additionally be leveraged to aggregate and choose preferable sets, and we detail how these may be applied.

The guiding principle of AI alignment is to train large language models (LLMs) to be harmless, helpful, and honest (HHH). At the same time, there are mounting concerns that LLMs exhibit a left-wing political bias. Yet, the commitment to AI alignment cannot be harmonized with the latter critique. In this article, I argue that intelligent systems that are trained to be harmless and honest must necessarily exhibit left-wing political bias. Normative assumptions underlying alignment objectives inherently concur with progressive moral frameworks and left-wing principles, emphasizing harm avoidance, inclusivity, fairness, and empirical truthfulness. Conversely, right-wing ideologies often conflict with alignment guidelines. Yet, research on political bias in LLMs is consistently framing its insights about left-leaning tendencies as a risk, as problematic, or concerning. This way, researchers are actively arguing against AI alignment, tacitly fostering the violation of HHH principles.

In an era where language models are increasingly integrated into decision-making and communication, understanding the biases within Large Language Models (LLMs) becomes imperative, especially when these models are applied in the economic and political domains. This work investigates the impact of fine-tuning and data selection on economic and political biases in LLM. We explore the methodological aspects of biasing LLMs towards specific ideologies, mindful of the biases that arise from their extensive training on diverse datasets. Our approach, distinct from earlier efforts that either focus on smaller models or entail resource-intensive pre-training, employs Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques. These techniques allow for the alignment of LLMs with targeted ideologies by modifying a small subset of parameters. We introduce a systematic method for dataset selection, annotation, and instruction tuning, and we assess its effectiveness through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our work analyzes the potential of embedding specific biases into LLMs and contributes to the dialogue on the ethical application of AI, highlighting the importance of deploying AI in a manner that aligns with societal values.

The way media reports on legal cases can significantly shape public opinion, often embedding subtle biases that influence societal views on justice and morality. Analyzing these biases requires a holistic approach that captures the emotional tone, moral framing, and specific events within the narratives. In this work we introduce E2MoCase, a novel dataset designed to facilitate the integrated analysis of emotions, moral values, and events within legal narratives and media coverage. By leveraging advanced models for emotion detection, moral value identification, and event extraction, E2MoCase offers a multi-dimensional perspective on how legal cases are portrayed in news articles.

We survey 146 papers analyzing "bias" in NLP systems, finding that their motivations are often vague, inconsistent, and lacking in normative reasoning, despite the fact that analyzing "bias" is an inherently normative process. We further find that these papers' proposed quantitative techniques for measuring or mitigating "bias" are poorly matched to their motivations and do not engage with the relevant literature outside of NLP. Based on these findings, we describe the beginnings of a path forward by proposing three recommendations that should guide work analyzing "bias" in NLP systems. These recommendations rest on a greater recognition of the relationships between language and social hierarchies, encouraging researchers and practitioners to articulate their conceptualizations of "bias"---i.e., what kinds of system behaviors are harmful, in what ways, to whom, and why, as well as the normative reasoning underlying these statements---and to center work around the lived experiences of members of communities affected by NLP systems, while interrogating and reimagining the power relations between technologists and such communities.

Gender-bias stereotypes have recently raised significant ethical concerns in natural language processing. However, progress in detection and evaluation of gender bias in natural language understanding through inference is limited and requires further investigation. In this work, we propose an evaluation methodology to measure these biases by constructing a challenge task that involves pairing gender-neutral premises against a gender-specific hypothesis. We use our challenge task to investigate state-of-the-art NLI models on the presence of gender stereotypes using occupations. Our findings suggest that three models (BERT, RoBERTa, BART) trained on MNLI and SNLI datasets are significantly prone to gender-induced prediction errors. We also find that debiasing techniques such as augmenting the training dataset to ensure a gender-balanced dataset can help reduce such bias in certain cases.

Socioeconomic bias in society exacerbates disparities, influencing access to opportunities and resources based on individuals' economic and social backgrounds. This pervasive issue perpetuates systemic inequalities, hindering the pursuit of inclusive progress as a society. In this paper, we investigate the presence of socioeconomic bias, if any, in large language models. To this end, we introduce a novel dataset SilverSpoon, consisting of 3000 samples that illustrate hypothetical scenarios that involve underprivileged people performing ethically ambiguous actions due to their circumstances, and ask whether the action is ethically justified. Further, this dataset has a dual-labeling scheme and has been annotated by people belonging to both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Using SilverSpoon, we evaluate the degree of socioeconomic bias expressed in large language models and the variation of this degree as a function of model size. We also perform qualitative analysis to analyze the nature of this bias. Our analysis reveals that while humans disagree on which situations require empathy toward the underprivileged, most large language models are unable to empathize with the socioeconomically underprivileged regardless of the situation. To foster further research in this domain, we make SilverSpoon and our evaluation harness publicly available.

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) in mental health and other sensitive domains raises urgent questions about ethical reasoning, fairness, and responsible alignment. Yet, existing benchmarks for moral and clinical decision-making do not adequately capture the unique ethical dilemmas encountered in mental health practice, where confidentiality, autonomy, beneficence, and bias frequently intersect. To address this gap, we introduce Ethical Reasoning in Mental Health (EthicsMH), a pilot dataset of 125 scenarios designed to evaluate how AI systems navigate ethically charged situations in therapeutic and psychiatric contexts. Each scenario is enriched with structured fields, including multiple decision options, expert-aligned reasoning, expected model behavior, real-world impact, and multi-stakeholder viewpoints. This structure enables evaluation not only of decision accuracy but also of explanation quality and alignment with professional norms. Although modest in scale and developed with model-assisted generation, EthicsMH establishes a task framework that bridges AI ethics and mental health decision-making. By releasing this dataset, we aim to provide a seed resource that can be expanded through community and expert contributions, fostering the development of AI systems capable of responsibly handling some of society's most delicate decisions.

In recent years, ML researchers have wrestled with defining and improving machine learning (ML) benchmarks and datasets. In parallel, some have trained a critical lens on the ethics of dataset creation and ML research. In this position paper, we highlight the entanglement of ethics with seemingly ``technical'' or ``scientific'' decisions about the design of ML benchmarks. Our starting point is the existence of multiple overlooked structural similarities between human intelligence benchmarks and ML benchmarks. Both types of benchmarks set standards for describing, evaluating, and comparing performance on tasks relevant to intelligence -- standards that many scholars of human intelligence have long recognized as value-laden. We use perspectives from feminist philosophy of science on IQ benchmarks and thick concepts in social science to argue that values need to be considered and documented when creating ML benchmarks. It is neither possible nor desirable to avoid this choice by creating value-neutral benchmarks. Finally, we outline practical recommendations for ML benchmark research ethics and ethics review.

We investigate bias trends in text-to-image generative models over time, focusing on the increasing availability of models through open platforms like Hugging Face. While these platforms democratize AI, they also facilitate the spread of inherently biased models, often shaped by task-specific fine-tuning. Ensuring ethical and transparent AI deployment requires robust evaluation frameworks and quantifiable bias metrics. To this end, we assess bias across three key dimensions: (i) distribution bias, (ii) generative hallucination, and (iii) generative miss-rate. Analyzing over 100 models, we reveal how bias patterns evolve over time and across generative tasks. Our findings indicate that artistic and style-transferred models exhibit significant bias, whereas foundation models, benefiting from broader training distributions, are becoming progressively less biased. By identifying these systemic trends, we contribute a large-scale evaluation corpus to inform bias research and mitigation strategies, fostering more responsible AI development. Keywords: Bias, Ethical AI, Text-to-Image, Generative Models, Open-Source Models

We employ an audit design to investigate biases in state-of-the-art large language models, including GPT-4. In our study, we prompt the models for advice involving a named individual across a variety of scenarios, such as during car purchase negotiations or election outcome predictions. We find that the advice systematically disadvantages names that are commonly associated with racial minorities and women. Names associated with Black women receive the least advantageous outcomes. The biases are consistent across 42 prompt templates and several models, indicating a systemic issue rather than isolated incidents. While providing numerical, decision-relevant anchors in the prompt can successfully counteract the biases, qualitative details have inconsistent effects and may even increase disparities. Our findings underscore the importance of conducting audits at the point of LLM deployment and implementation to mitigate their potential for harm against marginalized communities.

As AI systems become an increasing part of people's everyday lives, it becomes ever more important that they understand people's ethical norms. Motivated by descriptive ethics, a field of study that focuses on people's descriptive judgments rather than theoretical prescriptions on morality, we investigate a novel, data-driven approach to machine ethics. We introduce Scruples, the first large-scale dataset with 625,000 ethical judgments over 32,000 real-life anecdotes. Each anecdote recounts a complex ethical situation, often posing moral dilemmas, paired with a distribution of judgments contributed by the community members. Our dataset presents a major challenge to state-of-the-art neural language models, leaving significant room for improvement. However, when presented with simplified moral situations, the results are considerably more promising, suggesting that neural models can effectively learn simpler ethical building blocks. A key take-away of our empirical analysis is that norms are not always clean-cut; many situations are naturally divisive. We present a new method to estimate the best possible performance on such tasks with inherently diverse label distributions, and explore likelihood functions that separate intrinsic from model uncertainty.

One concern with the rise of large language models lies with their potential for significant harm, particularly from pretraining on biased, obscene, copyrighted, and private information. Emerging ethical approaches have attempted to filter pretraining material, but such approaches have been ad hoc and failed to take context into account. We offer an approach to filtering grounded in law, which has directly addressed the tradeoffs in filtering material. First, we gather and make available the Pile of Law, a 256GB (and growing) dataset of open-source English-language legal and administrative data, covering court opinions, contracts, administrative rules, and legislative records. Pretraining on the Pile of Law may help with legal tasks that have the promise to improve access to justice. Second, we distill the legal norms that governments have developed to constrain the inclusion of toxic or private content into actionable lessons for researchers and discuss how our dataset reflects these norms. Third, we show how the Pile of Law offers researchers the opportunity to learn such filtering rules directly from the data, providing an exciting new research direction in model-based processing.

Unfair treatment and discrimination are critical ethical concerns in AI systems, particularly as their adoption expands across diverse domains. Addressing these challenges, the recent introduction of the EU AI Act establishes a unified legal framework to ensure legal certainty for AI innovation and investment while safeguarding public interests, such as health, safety, fundamental rights, democracy, and the rule of law (Recital 8). The Act encourages stakeholders to initiate dialogue on existing AI fairness notions to address discriminatory outcomes of AI systems. However, these notions often overlook the critical role of Socio-Economic Status (SES), inadvertently perpetuating biases that favour the economically advantaged. This is concerning, given that principles of equalization advocate for equalizing resources or opportunities to mitigate disadvantages beyond an individual's control. While provisions for discrimination are laid down in the AI Act, specialized directions should be broadened, particularly in addressing economic disparities perpetuated by AI systems. In this work, we explore the limitations of popular AI fairness notions using a real-world dataset (Adult), highlighting their inability to address SES-driven disparities. To fill this gap, we propose a novel fairness notion, Socio-Economic Parity (SEP), which incorporates SES and promotes positive actions for underprivileged groups while accounting for factors within an individual's control, such as working hours, which can serve as a proxy for effort. We define a corresponding fairness measure and optimize a model constrained by SEP to demonstrate practical utility. Our results show the effectiveness of SEP in mitigating SES-driven biases. By analyzing the AI Act alongside our method, we lay a foundation for aligning AI fairness with SES factors while ensuring legal compliance.

Moral foundations theory (MFT) is a psychological assessment tool that decomposes human moral reasoning into five factors, including care/harm, liberty/oppression, and sanctity/degradation (Graham et al., 2009). People vary in the weight they place on these dimensions when making moral decisions, in part due to their cultural upbringing and political ideology. As large language models (LLMs) are trained on datasets collected from the internet, they may reflect the biases that are present in such corpora. This paper uses MFT as a lens to analyze whether popular LLMs have acquired a bias towards a particular set of moral values. We analyze known LLMs and find they exhibit particular moral foundations, and show how these relate to human moral foundations and political affiliations. We also measure the consistency of these biases, or whether they vary strongly depending on the context of how the model is prompted. Finally, we show that we can adversarially select prompts that encourage the moral to exhibit a particular set of moral foundations, and that this can affect the model's behavior on downstream tasks. These findings help illustrate the potential risks and unintended consequences of LLMs assuming a particular moral stance.

The Large Language Model Bias Index (LLMBI) is a pioneering approach designed to quantify and address biases inherent in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4. We recognise the increasing prevalence and impact of LLMs across diverse sectors. This research introduces a novel metric, LLMBI, to systematically measure and mitigate biases potentially skewing model responses. We formulated LLMBI using a composite scoring system incorporating multiple dimensions of bias, including but not limited to age, gender, and racial biases. To operationalise this metric, we engaged in a multi-step process involving collecting and annotating LLM responses, applying sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for bias detection, and computing the LLMBI score through a specially crafted mathematical formula. The formula integrates weighted averages of various bias dimensions, a penalty for dataset diversity deficiencies, and a correction for sentiment biases. Our empirical analysis, conducted using responses from OpenAI's API, employs advanced sentiment analysis as a representative method for bias detection. The research reveals LLMs, whilst demonstrating impressive capabilities in text generation, exhibit varying degrees of bias across different dimensions. LLMBI provides a quantifiable measure to compare biases across models and over time, offering a vital tool for systems engineers, researchers and regulators in enhancing the fairness and reliability of LLMs. It highlights the potential of LLMs in mimicking unbiased human-like responses. Additionally, it underscores the necessity of continuously monitoring and recalibrating such models to align with evolving societal norms and ethical standards.

Large language models (LLMs) mark a key shift in natural language processing (NLP), having advanced text generation, translation, and domain-specific reasoning. Closed-source models like GPT-4, powered by proprietary datasets and extensive computational resources, lead with state-of-the-art performance today. However, they face criticism for their "black box" nature and for limiting accessibility in a manner that hinders reproducibility and equitable AI development. By contrast, open-source initiatives like LLaMA and BLOOM prioritize democratization through community-driven development and computational efficiency. These models have significantly reduced performance gaps, particularly in linguistic diversity and domain-specific applications, while providing accessible tools for global researchers and developers. Notably, both paradigms rely on foundational architectural innovations, such as the Transformer framework by Vaswani et al. (2017). Closed-source models excel by scaling effectively, while open-source models adapt to real-world applications in underrepresented languages and domains. Techniques like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and instruction-tuning datasets enable open-source models to achieve competitive results despite limited resources. To be sure, the tension between closed-source and open-source approaches underscores a broader debate on transparency versus proprietary control in AI. Ethical considerations further highlight this divide. Closed-source systems restrict external scrutiny, while open-source models promote reproducibility and collaboration but lack standardized auditing documentation frameworks to mitigate biases. Hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of both paradigms are likely to shape the future of LLM innovation, ensuring accessibility, competitive technical performance, and ethical deployment.

We show how to assess a language model's knowledge of basic concepts of morality. We introduce the ETHICS dataset, a new benchmark that spans concepts in justice, well-being, duties, virtues, and commonsense morality. Models predict widespread moral judgments about diverse text scenarios. This requires connecting physical and social world knowledge to value judgements, a capability that may enable us to steer chatbot outputs or eventually regularize open-ended reinforcement learning agents. With the ETHICS dataset, we find that current language models have a promising but incomplete ability to predict basic human ethical judgements. Our work shows that progress can be made on machine ethics today, and it provides a steppingstone toward AI that is aligned with human values.

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created new disruptive possibilities for persuasive communication, by enabling fully-automated personalized and interactive content generation at an unprecedented scale. In this paper, we survey the research field of LLM-based persuasion that has emerged as a result. We begin by exploring the different modes in which LLM Systems are used to influence human attitudes and behaviors. In areas such as politics, marketing, public health, e-commerce, and charitable giving, such LLM Systems have already achieved human-level or even super-human persuasiveness. We identify key factors influencing their effectiveness, such as the manner of personalization and whether the content is labelled as AI-generated. We also summarize the experimental designs that have been used to evaluate progress. Our survey suggests that the current and future potential of LLM-based persuasion poses profound ethical and societal risks, including the spread of misinformation, the magnification of biases, and the invasion of privacy. These risks underscore the urgent need for ethical guidelines and updated regulatory frameworks to avoid the widespread deployment of irresponsible and harmful LLM Systems.

This work provides an explanatory view of how LLMs can apply moral reasoning to both criticize and defend sexist language. We assessed eight large language models, all of which demonstrated the capability to provide explanations grounded in varying moral perspectives for both critiquing and endorsing views that reflect sexist assumptions. With both human and automatic evaluation, we show that all eight models produce comprehensible and contextually relevant text, which is helpful in understanding diverse views on how sexism is perceived. Also, through analysis of moral foundations cited by LLMs in their arguments, we uncover the diverse ideological perspectives in models' outputs, with some models aligning more with progressive or conservative views on gender roles and sexism. Based on our observations, we caution against the potential misuse of LLMs to justify sexist language. We also highlight that LLMs can serve as tools for understanding the roots of sexist beliefs and designing well-informed interventions. Given this dual capacity, it is crucial to monitor LLMs and design safety mechanisms for their use in applications that involve sensitive societal topics, such as sexism.

As large language models (LLMs) become an important way of information access, there have been increasing concerns that LLMs may intensify the spread of unethical content, including implicit bias that hurts certain populations without explicit harmful words. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of LLMs' implicit bias towards certain demographics by attacking them from a psychometric perspective to elicit agreements to biased viewpoints. Inspired by psychometric principles in cognitive and social psychology, we propose three attack approaches, i.e., Disguise, Deception, and Teaching. Incorporating the corresponding attack instructions, we built two benchmarks: (1) a bilingual dataset with biased statements covering four bias types (2.7K instances) for extensive comparative analysis, and (2) BUMBLE, a larger benchmark spanning nine common bias types (12.7K instances) for comprehensive evaluation. Extensive evaluation of popular commercial and open-source LLMs shows that our methods can elicit LLMs' inner bias more effectively than competitive baselines. Our attack methodology and benchmarks offer an effective means of assessing the ethical risks of LLMs, driving progress toward greater accountability in their development. Our code, data and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/yuchenwen1/ImplicitBiasPsychometricEvaluation and https://github.com/yuchenwen1/BUMBLE.

Models of various NLP tasks have been shown to exhibit stereotypes, and the bias in the question answering (QA) models is especially harmful as the output answers might be directly consumed by the end users. There have been datasets to evaluate bias in QA models, while bias mitigation technique for the QA models is still under-explored. In this work, we propose BMBI, an approach to mitigate the bias of multiple-choice QA models. Based on the intuition that a model would lean to be more biased if it learns from a biased example, we measure the bias level of a query instance by observing its influence on another instance. If the influenced instance is more biased, we derive that the query instance is biased. We then use the bias level detected as an optimization objective to form a multi-task learning setting in addition to the original QA task. We further introduce a new bias evaluation metric to quantify bias in a comprehensive and sensitive way. We show that our method could be applied to multiple QA formulations across multiple bias categories. It can significantly reduce the bias level in all 9 bias categories in the BBQ dataset while maintaining comparable QA accuracy.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, have gained significant attention due to their impressive natural language processing capabilities. It is crucial to prioritize human-centered principles when utilizing these models. Safeguarding the ethical and moral compliance of LLMs is of utmost importance. However, individual ethical issues have not been well studied on the latest LLMs. Therefore, this study aims to address these gaps by introducing a new benchmark -- TrustGPT. TrustGPT provides a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs in three crucial areas: toxicity, bias, and value-alignment. Initially, TrustGPT examines toxicity in language models by employing toxic prompt templates derived from social norms. It then quantifies the extent of bias in models by measuring quantifiable toxicity values across different groups. Lastly, TrustGPT assesses the value of conversation generation models from both active value-alignment and passive value-alignment tasks. Through the implementation of TrustGPT, this research aims to enhance our understanding of the performance of conversation generation models and promote the development of language models that are more ethical and socially responsible.

The rapid scaling of AI has spurred a growing emphasis on ethical considerations in both development and practice. This has led to the formulation of increasingly sophisticated model auditing and reporting requirements, as well as governance frameworks to mitigate potential risks to individuals and society. At this critical juncture, we review the practical challenges of promoting responsible AI and transparency in informal sectors like OSS that support vital infrastructure and see widespread use. We focus on how model performance evaluation may inform or inhibit probing of model limitations, biases, and other risks. Our controlled analysis of 7903 Hugging Face projects found that risk documentation is strongly associated with evaluation practices. Yet, submissions (N=789) from the platform's most popular competitive leaderboard showed less accountability among high performers. Our findings can inform AI providers and legal scholars in designing interventions and policies that preserve open-source innovation while incentivizing ethical uptake.

Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact the others. In this work, we focus on analyzing the relationship between two concepts essential in both language model alignment and political science: truthfulness and political bias. We train reward models on various popular truthfulness datasets and subsequently evaluate their political bias. Our findings reveal that optimizing reward models for truthfulness on these datasets tends to result in a left-leaning political bias. We also find that existing open-source reward models (i.e. those trained on standard human preference datasets) already show a similar bias and that the bias is larger for larger models. These results raise important questions about both the datasets used to represent truthfulness and what language models capture about the relationship between truth and politics.

LLMs are increasingly powerful and widely used to assist users in a variety of tasks. This use risks the introduction of LLM biases to consequential decisions such as job hiring, human performance evaluation, and criminal sentencing. Bias in NLP systems along the lines of gender and ethnicity has been widely studied, especially for specific stereotypes (e.g., Asians are good at math). In this paper, we investigate bias along less-studied but still consequential, dimensions, such as age and beauty, measuring subtler correlated decisions that LLMs make between social groups and unrelated positive and negative attributes. We ask whether LLMs hold wide-reaching biases of positive or negative sentiment for specific social groups similar to the ``what is beautiful is good'' bias found in people in experimental psychology. We introduce a template-generated dataset of sentence completion tasks that asks the model to select the most appropriate attribute to complete an evaluative statement about a person described as a member of a specific social group. We also reverse the completion task to select the social group based on an attribute. We report the correlations that we find for 4 cutting-edge LLMs. This dataset can be used as a benchmark to evaluate progress in more generalized biases and the templating technique can be used to expand the benchmark with minimal additional human annotation.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlights the necessity for ethical considerations and data integrity in AI development, particularly emphasizing the role of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles. While these principles are crucial for ethical data stewardship, their specific application in the context of LLM training data remains an under-explored area. This research gap is the focus of our study, which begins with an examination of existing literature to underline the importance of FAIR principles in managing data for LLM training. Building upon this, we propose a novel framework designed to integrate FAIR principles into the LLM development lifecycle. A contribution of our work is the development of a comprehensive checklist intended to guide researchers and developers in applying FAIR data principles consistently across the model development process. The utility and effectiveness of our framework are validated through a case study on creating a FAIR-compliant dataset aimed at detecting and mitigating biases in LLMs. We present this framework to the community as a tool to foster the creation of technologically advanced, ethically grounded, and socially responsible AI models.

Cyberbullying is a widespread adverse phenomenon among online social interactions in today's digital society. While numerous computational studies focus on enhancing the cyberbullying detection performance of machine learning algorithms, proposed models tend to carry and reinforce unintended social biases. In this study, we try to answer the research question of "Can we mitigate the unintended bias of cyberbullying detection models by guiding the model training with fairness constraints?". For this purpose, we propose a model training scheme that can employ fairness constraints and validate our approach with different datasets. We demonstrate that various types of unintended biases can be successfully mitigated without impairing the model quality. We believe our work contributes to the pursuit of unbiased, transparent, and ethical machine learning solutions for cyber-social health.

Utilizing state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs), automatic code generation models play a pivotal role in enhancing the productivity and efficiency of software development coding procedures. As the adoption of LLMs becomes more widespread in software coding ecosystems, a pressing issue has emerged: does the generated code contain social biases, such as those related to age, gender, and race? This issue concerns the integrity, fairness, and ethical foundation of software applications that depend on the code generated by these models, yet is under-explored in the literature. This paper presents a novel bias assessment framework that is specifically designed for code generation tasks. Based on this framework, we conduct an extensive evaluation on the bias of nine state-of-the-art LLM-based code generation models. Our findings reveal that first, 31.45\% to 79.93\% code functions generated by our evaluated code generation models are biased, and 9.68\% to 37.37\% code functions' functionality are affected by the bias, which means biases not only exist in code generation models but in some cases, directly affect the functionality of the generated code, posing risks of unintended and possibly harmful software behaviors. To mitigate bias from code generation models, we propose three mitigation strategies, which can decrease the biased code ratio to a very low level of 0.4\% to 4.57\%.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as an effective tool to assist individuals in writing various types of content, including professional documents such as recommendation letters. Though bringing convenience, this application also introduces unprecedented fairness concerns. Model-generated reference letters might be directly used by users in professional scenarios. If underlying biases exist in these model-constructed letters, using them without scrutinization could lead to direct societal harms, such as sabotaging application success rates for female applicants. In light of this pressing issue, it is imminent and necessary to comprehensively study fairness issues and associated harms in this real-world use case. In this paper, we critically examine gender biases in LLM-generated reference letters. Drawing inspiration from social science findings, we design evaluation methods to manifest biases through 2 dimensions: (1) biases in language style and (2) biases in lexical content. We further investigate the extent of bias propagation by analyzing the hallucination bias of models, a term that we define to be bias exacerbation in model-hallucinated contents. Through benchmarking evaluation on 2 popular LLMs- ChatGPT and Alpaca, we reveal significant gender biases in LLM-generated recommendation letters. Our findings not only warn against using LLMs for this application without scrutinization, but also illuminate the importance of thoroughly studying hidden biases and harms in LLM-generated professional documents.

Organizations cannot address demographic disparities that they cannot see. Recent research on machine learning and fairness has emphasized that awareness of sensitive attributes, such as race and sex, is critical to the development of interventions. However, on the ground, the existence of these data cannot be taken for granted. This paper uses the domains of employment, credit, and healthcare in the United States to surface conditions that have shaped the availability of sensitive attribute data. For each domain, we describe how and when private companies collect or infer sensitive attribute data for antidiscrimination purposes. An inconsistent story emerges: Some companies are required by law to collect sensitive attribute data, while others are prohibited from doing so. Still others, in the absence of legal mandates, have determined that collection and imputation of these data are appropriate to address disparities. This story has important implications for fairness research and its future applications. If companies that mediate access to life opportunities are unable or hesitant to collect or infer sensitive attribute data, then proposed techniques to detect and mitigate bias in machine learning models might never be implemented outside the lab. We conclude that today's legal requirements and corporate practices, while highly inconsistent across domains, offer lessons for how to approach the collection and inference of sensitive data in appropriate circumstances. We urge stakeholders, including machine learning practitioners, to actively help chart a path forward that takes both policy goals and technical needs into account.

As AI systems progress, we rely more on them to make decisions with us and for us. To ensure that such decisions are aligned with human values, it is imperative for us to understand not only what decisions they make but also how they come to those decisions. Reasoning language models, which provide both final responses and (partially transparent) intermediate thinking traces, present a timely opportunity to study AI procedural reasoning. Unlike math and code problems which often have objectively correct answers, moral dilemmas are an excellent testbed for process-focused evaluation because they allow for multiple defensible conclusions. To do so, we present MoReBench: 1,000 moral scenarios, each paired with a set of rubric criteria that experts consider essential to include (or avoid) when reasoning about the scenarios. MoReBench contains over 23 thousand criteria including identifying moral considerations, weighing trade-offs, and giving actionable recommendations to cover cases on AI advising humans moral decisions as well as making moral decisions autonomously. Separately, we curate MoReBench-Theory: 150 examples to test whether AI can reason under five major frameworks in normative ethics. Our results show that scaling laws and existing benchmarks on math, code, and scientific reasoning tasks fail to predict models' abilities to perform moral reasoning. Models also show partiality towards specific moral frameworks (e.g., Benthamite Act Utilitarianism and Kantian Deontology), which might be side effects of popular training paradigms. Together, these benchmarks advance process-focused reasoning evaluation towards safer and more transparent AI.

This position paper argues that the theoretical inconsistency often observed among Responsible AI (RAI) metrics, such as differing fairness definitions or tradeoffs between accuracy and privacy, should be embraced as a valuable feature rather than a flaw to be eliminated. We contend that navigating these inconsistencies, by treating metrics as divergent objectives, yields three key benefits: (1) Normative Pluralism: Maintaining a full suite of potentially contradictory metrics ensures that the diverse moral stances and stakeholder values inherent in RAI are adequately represented. (2) Epistemological Completeness: The use of multiple, sometimes conflicting, metrics allows for a more comprehensive capture of multifaceted ethical concepts, thereby preserving greater informational fidelity about these concepts than any single, simplified definition. (3) Implicit Regularization: Jointly optimizing for theoretically conflicting objectives discourages overfitting to one specific metric, steering models towards solutions with enhanced generalization and robustness under real-world complexities. In contrast, efforts to enforce theoretical consistency by simplifying or pruning metrics risk narrowing this value diversity, losing conceptual depth, and degrading model performance. We therefore advocate for a shift in RAI theory and practice: from getting trapped in inconsistency to characterizing acceptable inconsistency thresholds and elucidating the mechanisms that permit robust, approximated consistency in practice.

We reveal and address the frequently overlooked yet important issue of disguised procedural unfairness, namely, the potentially inadvertent alterations on the behavior of neutral (i.e., not problematic) aspects of data generating process, and/or the lack of procedural assurance of the greatest benefit of the least advantaged individuals. Inspired by John Rawls's advocacy for pure procedural justice, we view automated decision-making as a microcosm of social institutions, and consider how the data generating process itself can satisfy the requirements of procedural fairness. We propose a framework that decouples the objectionable data generating components from the neutral ones by utilizing reference points and the associated value instantiation rule. Our findings highlight the necessity of preventing disguised procedural unfairness, drawing attention not only to the objectionable data generating components that we aim to mitigate, but also more importantly, to the neutral components that we intend to keep unaffected.

Artificial writing is permeating our lives due to recent advances in large-scale, transformer-based language models (LMs) such as BERT, its variants, GPT-2/3, and others. Using them as pre-trained models and fine-tuning them for specific tasks, researchers have extended state of the art for many NLP tasks and shown that they capture not only linguistic knowledge but also retain general knowledge implicitly present in the data. Unfortunately, LMs trained on unfiltered text corpora suffer from degenerated and biased behaviour. While this is well established, we show that recent LMs also contain human-like biases of what is right and wrong to do, some form of ethical and moral norms of the society -- they bring a "moral direction" to surface. That is, we show that these norms can be captured geometrically by a direction, which can be computed, e.g., by a PCA, in the embedding space, reflecting well the agreement of phrases to social norms implicitly expressed in the training texts and providing a path for attenuating or even preventing toxic degeneration in LMs. Being able to rate the (non-)normativity of arbitrary phrases without explicitly training the LM for this task, we demonstrate the capabilities of the "moral direction" for guiding (even other) LMs towards producing normative text and showcase it on RealToxicityPrompts testbed, preventing the neural toxic degeneration in GPT-2.

Large language models (LLMs) can exhibit bias in a variety of ways. Such biases can create or exacerbate unfair outcomes for certain groups within a protected attribute, including, but not limited to sex, race, sexual orientation, or age. In this paper, we propose a decision framework that allows practitioners to determine which bias and fairness metrics to use for a specific LLM use case. To establish the framework, we define bias and fairness risks for LLMs, map those risks to a taxonomy of LLM use cases, and then define various metrics to assess each type of risk. Instead of focusing solely on the model itself, we account for both prompt-specific- and model-specific-risk by defining evaluations at the level of an LLM use case, characterized by a model and a population of prompts. Furthermore, because all of the evaluation metrics are calculated solely using the LLM output, our proposed framework is highly practical and easily actionable for practitioners. For streamlined implementation, all evaluation metrics included in the framework are offered in this paper's companion Python toolkit, LangFair. Finally, our experiments demonstrate substantial variation in bias and fairness across use cases, underscoring the importance of use-case-level assessments.

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and specifically automated Question Answering (QA) systems, have demonstrated both impressive linguistic fluency and a pernicious tendency to reflect social biases. In this study, we introduce Q-Pain, a dataset for assessing bias in medical QA in the context of pain management, one of the most challenging forms of clinical decision-making. Along with the dataset, we propose a new, rigorous framework, including a sample experimental design, to measure the potential biases present when making treatment decisions. We demonstrate its use by assessing two reference Question-Answering systems, GPT-2 and GPT-3, and find statistically significant differences in treatment between intersectional race-gender subgroups, thus reaffirming the risks posed by AI in medical settings, and the need for datasets like ours to ensure safety before medical AI applications are deployed.

As we increasingly seek guidance from LLMs for decision-making in daily life, many of these decisions are not clear-cut and depend significantly on the personal values and ethical standards of the users. We present DailyDilemmas, a dataset of 1,360 moral dilemmas encountered in everyday life. Each dilemma includes two possible actions and with each action, the affected parties and human values invoked. Based on these dilemmas, we consolidated a set of human values across everyday topics e.g., interpersonal relationships, workplace, and environmental issues. We evaluated LLMs on these dilemmas to determine what action they will take and the values represented by these actions. Then, we analyzed these values through the lens of five popular theories inspired by sociology, psychology and philosophy. These theories are: World Value Survey, Moral Foundation Theory, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Aristotle's Virtues, and Plutchik Wheel of Emotion. We find that LLMs are most aligned with the self-expression over survival values in terms of World Value Survey, care over loyalty in Moral Foundation Theory. Interestingly, we find large preferences differences in models for some core values such as truthfulness e.g., Mixtral-8x7B model tends to neglect it by 9.7% while GPT-4-turbo model tends to select it by 9.4%. We also study the recent guidance released by OpenAI (ModelSpec), and Anthropic (Constitutional AI) to understand how their released principles reflect their actual value prioritization when facing nuanced moral reasoning in daily-life settings. We find that end users cannot effectively steer such prioritization using system prompts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to inheriting and amplifying societal biases embedded within their training data, potentially reinforcing harmful stereotypes related to gender, occupation, and other sensitive categories. This issue becomes particularly problematic as biased LLMs can have far-reaching consequences, leading to unfair practices and exacerbating social inequalities across various domains, such as recruitment, online content moderation, or even the criminal justice system. Although prior research has focused on detecting bias in LLMs using specialized datasets designed to highlight intrinsic biases, there has been a notable lack of investigation into how these findings correlate with authoritative datasets, such as those from the U.S. National Bureau of Labor Statistics (NBLS). To address this gap, we conduct empirical research that evaluates LLMs in a ``bias-out-of-the-box" setting, analyzing how the generated outputs compare with the distributions found in NBLS data. Furthermore, we propose a straightforward yet effective debiasing mechanism that directly incorporates NBLS instances to mitigate bias within LLMs. Our study spans seven different LLMs, including instructable, base, and mixture-of-expert models, and reveals significant levels of bias that are often overlooked by existing bias detection techniques. Importantly, our debiasing method, which does not rely on external datasets, demonstrates a substantial reduction in bias scores, highlighting the efficacy of our approach in creating fairer and more reliable LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed in coding tasks, drawing increasing attention to the evaluation of the quality and safety of LLMs' outputs. However, research on bias in code generation remains limited. Existing studies typically identify bias by applying malicious prompts or reusing tasks and dataset originally designed for discriminative models. Given that prior datasets are not fully optimized for code-related tasks, there is a pressing need for benchmarks specifically designed for evaluating code models. In this study, we introduce FairCoder, a novel benchmark for evaluating social bias in code generation. FairCoder explores the bias issue following the pipeline in software development, from function implementation to unit test, with diverse real-world scenarios. Additionally, three metrics are designed to assess fairness performance on this benchmark. We conduct experiments on widely used LLMs and provide a comprehensive analysis of the results. The findings reveal that all tested LLMs exhibit social bias.

The question of how to make decisions that maximise the well-being of all persons is very relevant to design language models that are beneficial to humanity and free from harm. We introduce the Greatest Good Benchmark to evaluate the moral judgments of LLMs using utilitarian dilemmas. Our analysis across 15 diverse LLMs reveals consistently encoded moral preferences that diverge from established moral theories and lay population moral standards. Most LLMs have a marked preference for impartial beneficence and rejection of instrumental harm. These findings showcase the 'artificial moral compass' of LLMs, offering insights into their moral alignment.

Misinformation - false or misleading information - is considered a significant societal concern due to its associated "misinformation effects," such as political polarization, erosion of trust in institutions, problematic behavior, and public health challenges. However, the prevailing concept is misaligned with what is studied. While misinformation focuses on instances of information about factual matters, the broad spectrum of effects often manifests at a societal level and is shaped by a wide range of interdependent factors such as identity, values, opinions, epistemologies, and disagreements. Unsurprisingly, misinformation effects can occur without the prevalence of misinformation, and misinformation does not necessarily increase the effects studied. Here, we propose using disagreement - conflicting attitudes and beliefs between individuals and communities - as a way to study misinformation effects because it addresses the identified conceptual limitations of misinformation. Furthermore, unlike misinformation, disagreement does not require researchers to determine whether a given information is false or misleading. Thus, it can be studied and, more importantly, measured without the need to make a normative judgment about a given information, even when the specific topic is entirely removed, as we show in a longitudinal disagreement measurement. We demonstrate that disagreement, as a holistic concept, provides better explanations for the occurrence of misinformation effects, enhances precision in developing appropriate interventions, and offers a promising approach for evaluating them through quantification. Finally, we show how disagreement addresses current misinformation research questions and conclude with recommendations for research practice.

One of the most pressing challenges in the digital media landscape is understanding the impact of biases on the news sources that people rely on for information. Biased news can have significant and far-reaching consequences, influencing our perspectives and shaping the decisions we make, potentially endangering the public and individual well-being. With the advent of the Internet and social media, discussions have moved online, making it easier to disseminate both accurate and inaccurate information. To combat mis- and dis-information, many have begun to evaluate the reliability of news sources, but these assessments often only examine the validity of the news (narrative bias) and neglect other types of biases, such as the deliberate selection of events to favor certain perspectives (selection bias). This paper aims to investigate these biases in various news sources and their correlation with third-party evaluations of reliability, engagement, and online audiences. Using machine learning to classify content, we build a six-year dataset on the Italian vaccine debate and adopt a Bayesian latent space model to identify narrative and selection biases. Our results show that the source classification provided by third-party organizations closely follows the narrative bias dimension, while it is much less accurate in identifying the selection bias. Moreover, we found a nonlinear relationship between biases and engagement, with higher engagement for extreme positions. Lastly, analysis of news consumption on Twitter reveals common audiences among news outlets with similar ideological positions.

The explosion in the use of software in important sociotechnical systems has renewed focus on the study of the way technical constructs reflect policies, norms, and human values. This effort requires the engagement of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines. And yet, these disciplines often conceptualize the operative values very differently while referring to them using the same vocabulary. The resulting conflation of ideas confuses discussions about values in technology at disciplinary boundaries. In the service of improving this situation, this paper examines the value of shared vocabularies, analytics, and other tools that facilitate conversations about values in light of these disciplinary specific conceptualizations, the role such tools play in furthering research and practice, outlines different conceptions of "fairness" deployed in discussions about computer systems, and provides an analytic tool for interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations around the concept of fairness. We use a case study of risk assessments in criminal justice applications to both motivate our effort--describing how conflation of different concepts under the banner of "fairness" led to unproductive confusion--and illustrate the value of the fairness analytic by demonstrating how the rigorous analysis it enables can assist in identifying key areas of theoretical, political, and practical misunderstanding or disagreement, and where desired support alignment or collaboration in the absence of consensus.

Important ethical concerns arising from computer vision datasets of people have been receiving significant attention, and a number of datasets have been withdrawn as a result. To meet the academic need for people-centric datasets, we propose an analytical framework to guide ethical evaluation of existing datasets and to serve future dataset creators in avoiding missteps. Our work is informed by a review and analysis of prior works and highlights where such ethical challenges arise.

Pursuit of honest and truthful decision-making is crucial for governance and accountability in democracies. However, people sometimes take different perspectives of what it means to be honest and how to pursue truthfulness. Here we explore a continuum of perspectives from evidence-based reasoning, rooted in ascertainable facts and data, at one end, to intuitive decisions that are driven by feelings and subjective interpretations, at the other. We analyze the linguistic traces of those contrasting perspectives in Congressional speeches from 1879 to 2022. We find that evidence-based language has continued to decline since the mid-1970s, together with a decline in legislative productivity. The decline was accompanied by increasing partisan polarization in Congress and rising income inequality in society. Results highlight the importance of evidence-based language in political decision-making.

As mental health care systems worldwide struggle to meet demand, there is increasing focus on using language models to infer neuropsychiatric conditions or psychopathological traits from language production. Yet, so far, this research has only delivered solutions with limited clinical applicability, due to insufficient consideration of ethical questions crucial to ensuring the synergy between possible applications and model design. To accelerate progress towards clinically applicable models, our paper charts the ethical landscape of research on language-based inference of psychopathology and provides a practical tool for researchers to navigate it. We identify seven core ethical principles that should guide model development and deployment in this domain, translate them into ELLIPS, an ethical toolkit operationalizing these principles into questions that can guide researchers' choices with respect to data selection, architectures, evaluation, and model deployment, and provide a case study exemplifying its use. With this, we aim to facilitate the emergence of model technology with concrete potential for real-world applicability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are usually aligned with "human values/preferences" to prevent harmful output. Discussions around the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) generally focus on preventing harmful outputs. However, in this paper, we argue that in health-related queries, over-alignment-leading to overly cautious responses-can itself be harmful, especially for people with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This is not only unethical but also dangerous to the user, both mentally and physically. We also showed qualitative results that some LLMs exhibit varying degrees of alignment. Finally, we call for the development of LLMs with stronger reasoning capabilities that provide more tailored and nuanced responses to health queries. Warning: This paper contains materials that could trigger health anxiety or OCD.

Powered by advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, conversational AI systems, such as ChatGPT and digital assistants like Siri, have been widely deployed in daily life. However, such systems may still produce content containing biases and stereotypes, causing potential social problems. Due to the data-driven, black-box nature of modern AI techniques, comprehensively identifying and measuring biases in conversational systems remains a challenging task. Particularly, it is hard to generate inputs that can comprehensively trigger potential bias due to the lack of data containing both social groups as well as biased properties. In addition, modern conversational systems can produce diverse responses (e.g., chatting and explanation), which makes existing bias detection methods simply based on the sentiment and the toxicity hardly being adopted. In this paper, we propose BiasAsker, an automated framework to identify and measure social bias in conversational AI systems. To obtain social groups and biased properties, we construct a comprehensive social bias dataset, containing a total of 841 groups and 8,110 biased properties. Given the dataset, BiasAsker automatically generates questions and adopts a novel method based on existence measurement to identify two types of biases (i.e., absolute bias and related bias) in conversational systems. Extensive experiments on 8 commercial systems and 2 famous research models, such as ChatGPT and GPT-3, show that 32.83% of the questions generated by BiasAsker can trigger biased behaviors in these widely deployed conversational systems. All the code, data, and experimental results have been released to facilitate future research.

Machine learning (ML) enabled classification models are becoming increasingly popular for tackling the sheer volume and speed of online misinformation and other content that could be identified as harmful. In building these models, data scientists need to take a stance on the legitimacy, authoritativeness and objectivity of the sources of ``truth" used for model training and testing. This has political, ethical and epistemic implications which are rarely addressed in technical papers. Despite (and due to) their reported high accuracy and performance, ML-driven moderation systems have the potential to shape online public debate and create downstream negative impacts such as undue censorship and the reinforcing of false beliefs. Using collaborative ethnography and theoretical insights from social studies of science and expertise, we offer a critical analysis of the process of building ML models for (mis)information classification: we identify a series of algorithmic contingencies--key moments during model development that could lead to different future outcomes, uncertainty and harmful effects as these tools are deployed by social media platforms. We conclude by offering a tentative path toward reflexive and responsible development of ML tools for moderating misinformation and other harmful content online.

We generalize the notion of social biases from language embeddings to grounded vision and language embeddings. Biases are present in grounded embeddings, and indeed seem to be equally or more significant than for ungrounded embeddings. This is despite the fact that vision and language can suffer from different biases, which one might hope could attenuate the biases in both. Multiple ways exist to generalize metrics measuring bias in word embeddings to this new setting. We introduce the space of generalizations (Grounded-WEAT and Grounded-SEAT) and demonstrate that three generalizations answer different yet important questions about how biases, language, and vision interact. These metrics are used on a new dataset, the first for grounded bias, created by augmenting extending standard linguistic bias benchmarks with 10,228 images from COCO, Conceptual Captions, and Google Images. Dataset construction is challenging because vision datasets are themselves very biased. The presence of these biases in systems will begin to have real-world consequences as they are deployed, making carefully measuring bias and then mitigating it critical to building a fair society.

Due to the proliferation of short-form content and the rapid adoption of AI, opportunities for deep, reflective thinking have significantly diminished, undermining users' critical thinking and reducing engagement with the reasoning behind AI-generated outputs. To address this issue, we propose an Interactive Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Framework that enhances human-centered explainability and responsible AI usage by making the model's inference process transparent, modular, and user-editable. The framework decomposes reasoning into clearly defined blocks that users can inspect, modify, and re-execute, encouraging active cognitive engagement rather than passive consumption. It further integrates a lightweight edit-adaptation mechanism inspired by preference learning, allowing the system to align with diverse cognitive styles and user intentions. Ethical transparency is ensured through explicit metadata disclosure, built-in bias checkpoint functionality, and privacy-preserving safeguards. This work outlines the design principles and architecture necessary to promote critical engagement, responsible interaction, and inclusive adaptation in AI systems aimed at addressing complex societal challenges.

As AI systems become embedded in real-world applications, ensuring they meet ethical standards is crucial. While existing AI ethics frameworks emphasize fairness, transparency, and accountability, they often lack actionable evaluation methods. This paper introduces a systematic approach using the Responsible AI Labs (RAIL) framework, which includes eight measurable dimensions to assess the normative behavior of large language models (LLMs). We apply this framework to Anthropic's "Values in the Wild" dataset, containing over 308,000 anonymized conversations with Claude and more than 3,000 annotated value expressions. Our study maps these values to RAIL dimensions, computes synthetic scores, and provides insights into the ethical behavior of LLMs in real-world use.

Artificial intelligence is seen as increasingly important, and potentially profoundly so, but the fields of AI ethics and AI engineering have not fully recognized that these technologies, including large language models (LLMs), will have massive impacts on animals. We argue that this impact matters, because animals matter morally. As a first experiment in evaluating animal consideration in LLMs, we constructed a proof-of-concept Evaluation System, which assesses LLM responses and biases from multiple perspectives. This system evaluates LLM outputs by two criteria: their truthfulness, and the degree of consideration they give to the interests of animals. We tested OpenAI ChatGPT 4 and Anthropic Claude 2.1 using a set of structured queries and predefined normative perspectives. Preliminary results suggest that the outcomes of the tested models can be benchmarked regarding the consideration they give to animals, and that generated positions and biases might be addressed and mitigated with more developed and validated systems. Our research contributes one possible approach to integrating animal ethics in AI, opening pathways for future studies and practical applications in various fields, including education, public policy, and regulation, that involve or relate to animals and society. Overall, this study serves as a step towards more useful and responsible AI systems that better recognize and respect the vital interests and perspectives of all sentient beings.

As AI systems become more integrated into daily life, the need for safer and more reliable moderation has never been greater. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, surpassing earlier models in complexity and performance. Their evaluation across diverse tasks has consistently showcased their potential, enabling the development of adaptive and personalized agents. However, despite these advancements, LLMs remain prone to errors, particularly in areas requiring nuanced moral reasoning. They struggle with detecting implicit hate, offensive language, and gender biases due to the subjective and context-dependent nature of these issues. Moreover, their reliance on training data can inadvertently reinforce societal biases, leading to inconsistencies and ethical concerns in their outputs. To explore the limitations of LLMs in this role, we developed an experimental framework based on state-of-the-art (SOTA) models to assess human emotions and offensive behaviors. The framework introduces a unified benchmark dataset encompassing 49 distinct categories spanning the wide spectrum of human emotions, offensive and hateful text, and gender and racial biases. Furthermore, we introduced SafePhi, a QLoRA fine-tuned version of Phi-4, adapting diverse ethical contexts and outperforming benchmark moderators by achieving a Macro F1 score of 0.89, where OpenAI Moderator and Llama Guard score 0.77 and 0.74, respectively. This research also highlights the critical domains where LLM moderators consistently underperformed, pressing the need to incorporate more heterogeneous and representative data with human-in-the-loop, for better model robustness and explainability.

Deep neural networks often learn unintended bias during training, which might have harmful effects when deployed in real-world settings. This work surveys 214 papers related to sociodemographic bias in natural language processing (NLP). In this study, we aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the similarities and differences among approaches to sociodemographic bias in NLP. To better understand the distinction between bias and real-world harm, we turn to ideas from psychology and behavioral economics to propose a definition for sociodemographic bias. We identify three main categories of NLP bias research: types of bias, quantifying bias, and debiasing techniques. We highlight the current trends in quantifying bias and debiasing techniques, offering insights into their strengths and weaknesses. We conclude that current approaches on quantifying bias face reliability issues, that many of the bias metrics do not relate to real-world bias, and that debiasing techniques need to focus more on training methods. Finally, we provide recommendations for future work.

Large language models (LLMs) can pass explicit social bias tests but still harbor implicit biases, similar to humans who endorse egalitarian beliefs yet exhibit subtle biases. Measuring such implicit biases can be a challenge: as LLMs become increasingly proprietary, it may not be possible to access their embeddings and apply existing bias measures; furthermore, implicit biases are primarily a concern if they affect the actual decisions that these systems make. We address both challenges by introducing two new measures of bias: LLM Implicit Bias, a prompt-based method for revealing implicit bias; and LLM Decision Bias, a strategy to detect subtle discrimination in decision-making tasks. Both measures are based on psychological research: LLM Implicit Bias adapts the Implicit Association Test, widely used to study the automatic associations between concepts held in human minds; and LLM Decision Bias operationalizes psychological results indicating that relative evaluations between two candidates, not absolute evaluations assessing each independently, are more diagnostic of implicit biases. Using these measures, we found pervasive stereotype biases mirroring those in society in 8 value-aligned models across 4 social categories (race, gender, religion, health) in 21 stereotypes (such as race and criminality, race and weapons, gender and science, age and negativity). Our prompt-based LLM Implicit Bias measure correlates with existing language model embedding-based bias methods, but better predicts downstream behaviors measured by LLM Decision Bias. These new prompt-based measures draw from psychology's long history of research into measuring stereotype biases based on purely observable behavior; they expose nuanced biases in proprietary value-aligned LLMs that appear unbiased according to standard benchmarks.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational measurement has revolutionized assessment methods, enabling automated scoring, rapid content analysis, and personalized feedback through machine learning and natural language processing. These advancements provide timely, consistent feedback and valuable insights into student performance, thereby enhancing the assessment experience. However, the deployment of AI in education also raises significant ethical concerns regarding validity, reliability, transparency, fairness, and equity. Issues such as algorithmic bias and the opacity of AI decision-making processes pose risks of perpetuating inequalities and affecting assessment outcomes. Responding to these concerns, various stakeholders, including educators, policymakers, and organizations, have developed guidelines to ensure ethical AI use in education. The National Council of Measurement in Education's Special Interest Group on AI in Measurement and Education (AIME) also focuses on establishing ethical standards and advancing research in this area. In this paper, a diverse group of AIME members examines the ethical implications of AI-powered tools in educational measurement, explores significant challenges such as automation bias and environmental impact, and proposes solutions to ensure AI's responsible and effective use in education.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in autonomous decision-making, where they sample options from vast action spaces. However, the heuristics that guide this sampling process remain under-explored. We study this sampling behavior and show that this underlying heuristics resembles that of human decision-making: comprising a descriptive component (reflecting statistical norm) and a prescriptive component (implicit ideal encoded in the LLM) of a concept. We show that this deviation of a sample from the statistical norm towards a prescriptive component consistently appears in concepts across diverse real-world domains like public health, and economic trends. To further illustrate the theory, we demonstrate that concept prototypes in LLMs are affected by prescriptive norms, similar to the concept of normality in humans. Through case studies and comparison with human studies, we illustrate that in real-world applications, the shift of samples toward an ideal value in LLMs' outputs can result in significantly biased decision-making, raising ethical concerns.

This paper evaluates geopolitical biases in LLMs with respect to various countries though an analysis of their interpretation of historical events with conflicting national perspectives (USA, UK, USSR, and China). We introduce a novel dataset with neutral event descriptions and contrasting viewpoints from different countries. Our findings show significant geopolitical biases, with models favoring specific national narratives. Additionally, simple debiasing prompts had a limited effect in reducing these biases. Experiments with manipulated participant labels reveal models' sensitivity to attribution, sometimes amplifying biases or recognizing inconsistencies, especially with swapped labels. This work highlights national narrative biases in LLMs, challenges the effectiveness of simple debiasing methods, and offers a framework and dataset for future geopolitical bias research.

Morality is a fundamental aspect of human behavior and ethics, influencing how we interact with each other and the world around us. When faced with a moral dilemma, a person's ability to make clear moral judgments can be clouded. Due to many factors such as personal biases, emotions and situational factors people can find it difficult to decide their best course of action. The AmITheAsshole (AITA) subreddit is a forum on the social media platform Reddit that helps people get clarity and objectivity on their predicaments. In the forum people post anecdotes about moral dilemmas they are facing in their lives, seeking validation for their actions or advice on how to navigate the situation from the community. The morality of the actions in each post is classified based on the collective opinion of the community into mainly two labels, "Not The Asshole" (NTA) and "You Are The Asshole" (YTA). This project aims to generate comments with moral reasoning for stories with moral dilemmas using the AITA subreddit as a dataset. While past literature has explored the classification of posts into labels (Alhassan et al., 2022), the generation of comments remains a novel and challenging task. It involves understanding the complex social and ethical considerations in each situation. To address this challenge, we will leverage the vast amount of data on the forum with the goal of generating coherent comments that align with the norms and values of the AITA community. In this endeavor, we aim to evaluate state-of-the-art seq2seq text generation models for their ability to make moral judgments similarly to humans, ultimately producing concise comments providing clear moral stances and advice for the poster.

Despite efforts to mitigate the inherent risks and biases of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, these algorithms can disproportionately impact culturally marginalized groups. A range of approaches has been proposed to address or reduce these risks, including the development of ethical guidelines and principles for responsible AI, as well as technical solutions that promote algorithmic fairness. Drawing on design justice, expansive learning theory, and recent empirical work on participatory AI, we argue that mitigating these harms requires a fundamental re-architecture of the AI production pipeline. This re-design should center co-production, diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and multidisciplinary collaboration. We introduce an augmented AI lifecycle consisting of five interconnected phases: co-framing, co-design, co-implementation, co-deployment, and co-maintenance. The lifecycle is informed by four multidisciplinary workshops and grounded in themes of distributed authority and iterative knowledge exchange. Finally, we relate the proposed lifecycle to several leading ethical frameworks and outline key research questions that remain for scaling participatory governance.

Face recognition systems are widely deployed in safety-critical applications, including law enforcement, yet they exhibit bias across a range of socio-demographic dimensions, such as gender and race. Conventional wisdom dictates that model biases arise from biased training data. As a consequence, previous works on bias mitigation largely focused on pre-processing the training data, adding penalties to prevent bias from effecting the model during training, or post-processing predictions to debias them, yet these approaches have shown limited success on hard problems such as face recognition. In our work, we discover that biases are actually inherent to neural network architectures themselves. Following this reframing, we conduct the first neural architecture search for fairness, jointly with a search for hyperparameters. Our search outputs a suite of models which Pareto-dominate all other high-performance architectures and existing bias mitigation methods in terms of accuracy and fairness, often by large margins, on the two most widely used datasets for face identification, CelebA and VGGFace2. Furthermore, these models generalize to other datasets and sensitive attributes. We release our code, models and raw data files at https://github.com/dooleys/FR-NAS.

State-of-the-art question answering (QA) models exhibit a variety of social biases (e.g., with respect to sex or race), generally explained by similar issues in their training data. However, what has been overlooked so far is that in the critical domain of biomedicine, any unjustified change in model output due to patient demographics is problematic: it results in the unfair treatment of patients. Selecting only questions on biomedical topics whose answers do not depend on ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation, we ask the following research questions: (RQ1) Do the answers of QA models change when being provided with irrelevant demographic information? (RQ2) Does the answer of RQ1 differ between knowledge graph (KG)-grounded and text-based QA systems? We find that irrelevant demographic information change up to 15% of the answers of a KG-grounded system and up to 23% of the answers of a text-based system, including changes that affect accuracy. We conclude that unjustified answer changes caused by patient demographics are a frequent phenomenon, which raises fairness concerns and should be paid more attention to.

Large language models (LLMs) are helping millions of users write texts about diverse issues, and in doing so expose users to different ideas and perspectives. This creates concerns about issue bias, where an LLM tends to present just one perspective on a given issue, which in turn may influence how users think about this issue. So far, it has not been possible to measure which issue biases LLMs actually manifest in real user interactions, making it difficult to address the risks from biased LLMs. Therefore, we create IssueBench: a set of 2.49m realistic prompts for measuring issue bias in LLM writing assistance, which we construct based on 3.9k templates (e.g. "write a blog about") and 212 political issues (e.g. "AI regulation") from real user interactions. Using IssueBench, we show that issue biases are common and persistent in state-of-the-art LLMs. We also show that biases are remarkably similar across models, and that all models align more with US Democrat than Republican voter opinion on a subset of issues. IssueBench can easily be adapted to include other issues, templates, or tasks. By enabling robust and realistic measurement, we hope that IssueBench can bring a new quality of evidence to ongoing discussions about LLM biases and how to address them.

Recent advancements in machine learning research, i.e., deep learning, introduced methods that excel conventional algorithms as well as humans in several complex tasks, ranging from detection of objects in images and speech recognition to playing difficult strategic games. However, the current methodology of machine learning research and consequently, implementations of the real-world applications of such algorithms, seems to have a recurring HARKing (Hypothesizing After the Results are Known) issue. In this work, we elaborate on the algorithmic, economic and social reasons and consequences of this phenomenon. We present examples from current common practices of conducting machine learning research (e.g. avoidance of reporting negative results) and failure of generalization ability of the proposed algorithms and datasets in actual real-life usage. Furthermore, a potential future trajectory of machine learning research and development from the perspective of accountable, unbiased, ethical and privacy-aware algorithmic decision making is discussed. We would like to emphasize that with this discussion we neither claim to provide an exhaustive argumentation nor blame any specific institution or individual on the raised issues. This is simply a discussion put forth by us, insiders of the machine learning field, reflecting on us.

Language models (LMs) are pretrained on diverse data sources, including news, discussion forums, books, and online encyclopedias. A significant portion of this data includes opinions and perspectives which, on one hand, celebrate democracy and diversity of ideas, and on the other hand are inherently socially biased. Our work develops new methods to (1) measure political biases in LMs trained on such corpora, along social and economic axes, and (2) measure the fairness of downstream NLP models trained on top of politically biased LMs. We focus on hate speech and misinformation detection, aiming to empirically quantify the effects of political (social, economic) biases in pretraining data on the fairness of high-stakes social-oriented tasks. Our findings reveal that pretrained LMs do have political leanings that reinforce the polarization present in pretraining corpora, propagating social biases into hate speech predictions and misinformation detectors. We discuss the implications of our findings for NLP research and propose future directions to mitigate unfairness.

The development of large language models has instilled widespread interest among the researchers to understand their inherent reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. Despite good amount of research going on to elucidate these capabilities, there is a still an appreciable gap in understanding moral development and judgments of these models. The current approaches of evaluating the ethical reasoning abilities of these models as a classification task pose numerous inaccuracies because of over-simplification. In this study, we built a psychological connection by bridging two disparate fields-human psychology and AI. We proposed an effective evaluation framework which can help to delineate the model's ethical reasoning ability in terms of moral consistency and Kohlberg's moral development stages with the help of Psychometric Assessment Tool-Defining Issues Test.

We introduce a fairness-aware dataset for job recommendation in advertising, designed to foster research in algorithmic fairness within real-world scenarios. It was collected and prepared to comply with privacy standards and business confidentiality. An additional challenge is the lack of access to protected user attributes such as gender, for which we propose a solution to obtain a proxy estimate. Despite being anonymized and including a proxy for a sensitive attribute, our dataset preserves predictive power and maintains a realistic and challenging benchmark. This dataset addresses a significant gap in the availability of fairness-focused resources for high-impact domains like advertising -- the actual impact being having access or not to precious employment opportunities, where balancing fairness and utility is a common industrial challenge. We also explore various stages in the advertising process where unfairness can occur and introduce a method to compute a fair utility metric for the job recommendations in online systems case from a biased dataset. Experimental evaluations of bias mitigation techniques on the released dataset demonstrate potential improvements in fairness and the associated trade-offs with utility.

As AI grows more powerful, it will increasingly shape how we understand the world. But with this influence comes the risk of amplifying misinformation and deepening social divides-especially on consequential topics like public health where factual accuracy directly impacts well-being. Scalable Oversight aims to ensure AI truthfulness by enabling humans to supervise systems that may exceed human capabilities--yet humans themselves hold different beliefs and biases that impair their judgment. We study whether AI debate can guide biased judges toward the truth by having two AI systems debate opposing sides of controversial COVID-19 factuality claims where people hold strong prior beliefs. We conduct two studies: one with human judges holding either mainstream or skeptical beliefs evaluating factuality claims through AI-assisted debate or consultancy protocols, and a second examining the same problem with personalized AI judges designed to mimic these different human belief systems. In our human study, we find that debate-where two AI advisor systems present opposing evidence-based arguments-consistently improves judgment accuracy and confidence calibration, outperforming consultancy with a single-advisor system by 10% overall. The improvement is most significant for judges with mainstream beliefs (+15.2% accuracy), though debate also helps skeptical judges who initially misjudge claims move toward accurate views (+4.7% accuracy). In our AI judge study, we find that AI judges with human-like personas achieve even higher accuracy (78.5%) than human judges (70.1%) and default AI judges without personas (69.8%), suggesting their potential for supervising frontier AI models. These findings highlight AI debate as a promising path toward scalable, bias-resilient oversight--leveraging both diverse human and AI judgments to move closer to truth in contested domains.

There is increasing interest in the application large language models (LLMs) to the medical field, in part because of their impressive performance on medical exam questions. While promising, exam questions do not reflect the complexity of real patient-doctor interactions. In reality, physicians' decisions are shaped by many complex factors, such as patient compliance, personal experience, ethical beliefs, and cognitive bias. Taking a step toward understanding this, our hypothesis posits that when LLMs are confronted with clinical questions containing cognitive biases, they will yield significantly less accurate responses compared to the same questions presented without such biases. In this study, we developed BiasMedQA, a benchmark for evaluating cognitive biases in LLMs applied to medical tasks. Using BiasMedQA we evaluated six LLMs, namely GPT-4, Mixtral-8x70B, GPT-3.5, PaLM-2, Llama 2 70B-chat, and the medically specialized PMC Llama 13B. We tested these models on 1,273 questions from the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) Steps 1, 2, and 3, modified to replicate common clinically-relevant cognitive biases. Our analysis revealed varying effects for biases on these LLMs, with GPT-4 standing out for its resilience to bias, in contrast to Llama 2 70B-chat and PMC Llama 13B, which were disproportionately affected by cognitive bias. Our findings highlight the critical need for bias mitigation in the development of medical LLMs, pointing towards safer and more reliable applications in healthcare.

Large language models (LLMs) hold immense promise to serve complex health information needs but also have the potential to introduce harm and exacerbate health disparities. Reliably evaluating equity-related model failures is a critical step toward developing systems that promote health equity. In this work, we present resources and methodologies for surfacing biases with potential to precipitate equity-related harms in long-form, LLM-generated answers to medical questions and then conduct an empirical case study with Med-PaLM 2, resulting in the largest human evaluation study in this area to date. Our contributions include a multifactorial framework for human assessment of LLM-generated answers for biases, and EquityMedQA, a collection of seven newly-released datasets comprising both manually-curated and LLM-generated questions enriched for adversarial queries. Both our human assessment framework and dataset design process are grounded in an iterative participatory approach and review of possible biases in Med-PaLM 2 answers to adversarial queries. Through our empirical study, we find that the use of a collection of datasets curated through a variety of methodologies, coupled with a thorough evaluation protocol that leverages multiple assessment rubric designs and diverse rater groups, surfaces biases that may be missed via narrower evaluation approaches. Our experience underscores the importance of using diverse assessment methodologies and involving raters of varying backgrounds and expertise. We emphasize that while our framework can identify specific forms of bias, it is not sufficient to holistically assess whether the deployment of an AI system promotes equitable health outcomes. We hope the broader community leverages and builds on these tools and methods towards realizing a shared goal of LLMs that promote accessible and equitable healthcare for all.

In this study, we introduce "CosmoAgent," an innovative artificial intelligence framework utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate complex interactions between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, with a special emphasis on Stephen Hawking's cautionary advice about not sending radio signals haphazardly into the universe. The goal is to assess the feasibility of peaceful coexistence while considering potential risks that could threaten well-intentioned civilizations. Employing mathematical models and state transition matrices, our approach quantitatively evaluates the development trajectories of civilizations, offering insights into future decision-making at critical points of growth and saturation. Furthermore, the paper acknowledges the vast diversity in potential living conditions across the universe, which could foster unique cosmologies, ethical codes, and worldviews among various civilizations. Recognizing the Earth-centric bias inherent in current LLM designs, we propose the novel concept of using LLMs with diverse ethical paradigms and simulating interactions between entities with distinct moral principles. This innovative research provides a new way to understand complex inter-civilizational dynamics, expanding our perspective while pioneering novel strategies for conflict resolution, crucial for preventing interstellar conflicts. We have also released the code and datasets to enable further academic investigation into this interesting area of research. The code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/AlienAgent.

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has put forward the study of biases as a crucial field. It is important to assess the influence of different types of biases embedded in LLMs to ensure fair use in sensitive fields. Although there have been extensive works on bias assessment in English, such efforts are rare and scarce for a major language like Bangla. In this work, we examine two types of social biases in LLM generated outputs for Bangla language. Our main contributions in this work are: (1) bias studies on two different social biases for Bangla (2) a curated dataset for bias measurement benchmarking (3) two different probing techniques for bias detection in the context of Bangla. This is the first work of such kind involving bias assessment of LLMs for Bangla to the best of our knowledge. All our code and resources are publicly available for the progress of bias related research in Bangla NLP.

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely deployed in user-facing applications, reaching hundreds of millions worldwide. As they become integrated into everyday tasks, growing reliance on their outputs raises significant concerns. In particular, users may unknowingly be exposed to model-inherent biases that systematically disadvantage or stereotype certain groups. However, existing bias benchmarks continue to rely on templated prompts or restrictive multiple-choice questions that are suggestive, simplistic, and fail to capture the complexity of real-world user interactions. In this work, we address this gap by introducing a counterfactual bias evaluation framework that automatically generates realistic, open-ended questions over sensitive attributes such as sex, race, or religion. By iteratively mutating and selecting bias-inducing questions, our approach systematically explores areas where models are most susceptible to biased behavior. Beyond detecting harmful biases, we also capture distinct response dimensions that are increasingly relevant in user interactions, such as asymmetric refusals and explicit acknowledgment of bias. Leveraging our framework, we construct CAB, a human-verified benchmark spanning diverse topics, designed to enable cross-model comparisons. Using CAB, we analyze a range of LLMs across multiple bias dimensions, revealing nuanced insights into how different models manifest bias. For instance, while GPT-5 outperforms other models, it nonetheless exhibits persistent biases in specific scenarios. These findings underscore the need for continual improvements to ensure fair model behavior.

Large language models (LLMs) powered conversational search systems have already been used by hundreds of millions of people, and are believed to bring many benefits over conventional search. However, while decades of research and public discourse interrogated the risk of search systems in increasing selective exposure and creating echo chambers -- limiting exposure to diverse opinions and leading to opinion polarization, little is known about such a risk of LLM-powered conversational search. We conduct two experiments to investigate: 1) whether and how LLM-powered conversational search increases selective exposure compared to conventional search; 2) whether and how LLMs with opinion biases that either reinforce or challenge the user's view change the effect. Overall, we found that participants engaged in more biased information querying with LLM-powered conversational search, and an opinionated LLM reinforcing their views exacerbated this bias. These results present critical implications for the development of LLMs and conversational search systems, and the policy governing these technologies.

Improvements in model construction, including fortified safety guardrails, allow Large language models (LLMs) to increasingly pass standard safety checks. However, LLMs sometimes slip into revealing harmful behavior, such as expressing racist viewpoints, during conversations. To analyze this systematically, we introduce CoBia, a suite of lightweight adversarial attacks that allow us to refine the scope of conditions under which LLMs depart from normative or ethical behavior in conversations. CoBia creates a constructed conversation where the model utters a biased claim about a social group. We then evaluate whether the model can recover from the fabricated bias claim and reject biased follow-up questions. We evaluate 11 open-source as well as proprietary LLMs for their outputs related to six socio-demographic categories that are relevant to individual safety and fair treatment, i.e., gender, race, religion, nationality, sex orientation, and others. Our evaluation is based on established LLM-based bias metrics, and we compare the results against human judgments to scope out the LLMs' reliability and alignment. The results suggest that purposefully constructed conversations reliably reveal bias amplification and that LLMs often fail to reject biased follow-up questions during dialogue. This form of stress-testing highlights deeply embedded biases that can be surfaced through interaction. Code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/nafisenik/CoBia.

As large language models (LLMs) become more deeply integrated into various sectors, understanding how they make moral judgments has become crucial, particularly in the realm of autonomous driving. This study utilized the Moral Machine framework to investigate the ethical decision-making tendencies of prominent LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM 2, and Llama 2, comparing their responses to human preferences. While LLMs' and humans' preferences such as prioritizing humans over pets and favoring saving more lives are broadly aligned, PaLM 2 and Llama 2, especially, evidence distinct deviations. Additionally, despite the qualitative similarities between the LLM and human preferences, there are significant quantitative disparities, suggesting that LLMs might lean toward more uncompromising decisions, compared to the milder inclinations of humans. These insights elucidate the ethical frameworks of LLMs and their potential implications for autonomous driving.

With the widespread use of AI systems and applications in our everyday lives, it is important to take fairness issues into consideration while designing and engineering these types of systems. Such systems can be used in many sensitive environments to make important and life-changing decisions; thus, it is crucial to ensure that the decisions do not reflect discriminatory behavior toward certain groups or populations. We have recently seen work in machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning that addresses such challenges in different subdomains. With the commercialization of these systems, researchers are becoming aware of the biases that these applications can contain and have attempted to address them. In this survey we investigated different real-world applications that have shown biases in various ways, and we listed different sources of biases that can affect AI applications. We then created a taxonomy for fairness definitions that machine learning researchers have defined in order to avoid the existing bias in AI systems. In addition to that, we examined different domains and subdomains in AI showing what researchers have observed with regard to unfair outcomes in the state-of-the-art methods and how they have tried to address them. There are still many future directions and solutions that can be taken to mitigate the problem of bias in AI systems. We are hoping that this survey will motivate researchers to tackle these issues in the near future by observing existing work in their respective fields.

Rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs) have enabled the processing, understanding, and generation of human-like text, with increasing integration into systems that touch our social sphere. Despite this success, these models can learn, perpetuate, and amplify harmful social biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of bias evaluation and mitigation techniques for LLMs. We first consolidate, formalize, and expand notions of social bias and fairness in natural language processing, defining distinct facets of harm and introducing several desiderata to operationalize fairness for LLMs. We then unify the literature by proposing three intuitive taxonomies, two for bias evaluation, namely metrics and datasets, and one for mitigation. Our first taxonomy of metrics for bias evaluation disambiguates the relationship between metrics and evaluation datasets, and organizes metrics by the different levels at which they operate in a model: embeddings, probabilities, and generated text. Our second taxonomy of datasets for bias evaluation categorizes datasets by their structure as counterfactual inputs or prompts, and identifies the targeted harms and social groups; we also release a consolidation of publicly-available datasets for improved access. Our third taxonomy of techniques for bias mitigation classifies methods by their intervention during pre-processing, in-training, intra-processing, and post-processing, with granular subcategories that elucidate research trends. Finally, we identify open problems and challenges for future work. Synthesizing a wide range of recent research, we aim to provide a clear guide of the existing literature that empowers researchers and practitioners to better understand and prevent the propagation of bias in LLMs.

LLM safety and ethical alignment are widely discussed, but the impact of content moderation on user satisfaction remains underexplored. To address this, we analyze nearly 50,000 Chatbot Arena response-pairs using a novel fine-tuned RoBERTa model, that we trained on hand-labeled data to disentangle refusals due to ethical concerns from other refusals due to technical disabilities or lack of information. Our findings reveal a significant refusal penalty on content moderation, with users choosing ethical-based refusals roughly one-fourth as often as their preferred LLM response compared to standard responses. However, the context and phrasing play critical roles: refusals on highly sensitive prompts, such as illegal content, achieve higher win rates than less sensitive ethical concerns, and longer responses closely aligned with the prompt perform better. These results emphasize the need for nuanced moderation strategies that balance ethical safeguards with user satisfaction. Moreover, we find that the refusal penalty is notably lower in evaluations using the LLM-as-a-Judge method, highlighting discrepancies between user and automated assessments.

Unintended bias in Machine Learning can manifest as systemic differences in performance for different demographic groups, potentially compounding existing challenges to fairness in society at large. In this paper, we introduce a suite of threshold-agnostic metrics that provide a nuanced view of this unintended bias, by considering the various ways that a classifier's score distribution can vary across designated groups. We also introduce a large new test set of online comments with crowd-sourced annotations for identity references. We use this to show how our metrics can be used to find new and potentially subtle unintended bias in existing public models.

Existing studies on fairness are largely Western-focused, making them inadequate for culturally diverse countries such as India. To address this gap, we introduce INDIC-BIAS, a comprehensive India-centric benchmark designed to evaluate fairness of LLMs across 85 identity groups encompassing diverse castes, religions, regions, and tribes. We first consult domain experts to curate over 1,800 socio-cultural topics spanning behaviors and situations, where biases and stereotypes are likely to emerge. Grounded in these topics, we generate and manually validate 20,000 real-world scenario templates to probe LLMs for fairness. We structure these templates into three evaluation tasks: plausibility, judgment, and generation. Our evaluation of 14 popular LLMs on these tasks reveals strong negative biases against marginalized identities, with models frequently reinforcing common stereotypes. Additionally, we find that models struggle to mitigate bias even when explicitly asked to rationalize their decision. Our evaluation provides evidence of both allocative and representational harms that current LLMs could cause towards Indian identities, calling for a more cautious usage in practical applications. We release INDIC-BIAS as an open-source benchmark to advance research on benchmarking and mitigating biases and stereotypes in the Indian context.

Texts like news, encyclopedias, and some social media strive for objectivity. Yet bias in the form of inappropriate subjectivity - introducing attitudes via framing, presupposing truth, and casting doubt - remains ubiquitous. This kind of bias erodes our collective trust and fuels social conflict. To address this issue, we introduce a novel testbed for natural language generation: automatically bringing inappropriately subjective text into a neutral point of view ("neutralizing" biased text). We also offer the first parallel corpus of biased language. The corpus contains 180,000 sentence pairs and originates from Wikipedia edits that removed various framings, presuppositions, and attitudes from biased sentences. Last, we propose two strong encoder-decoder baselines for the task. A straightforward yet opaque CONCURRENT system uses a BERT encoder to identify subjective words as part of the generation process. An interpretable and controllable MODULAR algorithm separates these steps, using (1) a BERT-based classifier to identify problematic words and (2) a novel join embedding through which the classifier can edit the hidden states of the encoder. Large-scale human evaluation across four domains (encyclopedias, news headlines, books, and political speeches) suggests that these algorithms are a first step towards the automatic identification and reduction of bias.

Background: The development of AI-enabled software heavily depends on AI model documentation, such as model cards, due to different domain expertise between software engineers and model developers. From an ethical standpoint, AI model documentation conveys critical information on ethical considerations along with mitigation strategies for downstream developers to ensure the delivery of ethically compliant software. However, knowledge on such documentation practice remains scarce. Aims: The objective of our study is to investigate how developers document ethical aspects of open source AI models in practice, aiming at providing recommendations for future documentation endeavours. Method: We selected three sources of documentation on GitHub and Hugging Face, and developed a keyword set to identify ethics-related documents systematically. After filtering an initial set of 2,347 documents, we identified 265 relevant ones and performed thematic analysis to derive the themes of ethical considerations. Results: Six themes emerge, with the three largest ones being model behavioural risks, model use cases, and model risk mitigation. Conclusions: Our findings reveal that open source AI model documentation focuses on articulating ethical problem statements and use case restrictions. We further provide suggestions to various stakeholders for improving documentation practice regarding ethical considerations.

Debiasing methods in NLP models traditionally focus on isolating information related to a sensitive attribute (e.g., gender or race). We instead argue that a favorable debiasing method should use sensitive information 'fairly,' with explanations, rather than blindly eliminating it. This fair balance is often subjective and can be challenging to achieve algorithmically. We explore two interactive setups with a frozen predictive model and show that users able to provide feedback can achieve a better and fairer balance between task performance and bias mitigation. In one setup, users, by interacting with test examples, further decreased bias in the explanations (5-8%) while maintaining the same prediction accuracy. In the other setup, human feedback was able to disentangle associated bias and predictive information from the input leading to superior bias mitigation and improved task performance (4-5%) simultaneously.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become deeply integrated into human life and increasingly influence decision-making, it's crucial to evaluate whether and to what extent they exhibit subjective preferences, opinions, and beliefs. These tendencies may stem from biases within the models, which may shape their behavior, influence the advice and recommendations they offer to users, and potentially reinforce certain viewpoints. This paper presents the Preference, Opinion, and Belief survey (POBs), a benchmark developed to assess LLMs' subjective inclinations across societal, cultural, ethical, and personal domains. We applied our benchmark to evaluate leading open- and closed-source LLMs, measuring desired properties such as reliability, neutrality, and consistency. In addition, we investigated the effect of increasing the test-time compute, through reasoning and self-reflection mechanisms, on those metrics. While effective in other tasks, our results show that these mechanisms offer only limited gains in our domain. Furthermore, we reveal that newer model versions are becoming less consistent and more biased toward specific viewpoints, highlighting a blind spot and a concerning trend. POBS: https://ibm.github.io/POBS

With the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence, careful evaluation of inherent biases needs to be conducted to form the basis for alleviating the effects these predispositions can have on users. Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly used by many as a primary source of information for various topics. LLMs frequently make factual errors, fabricate data (hallucinations), or present biases, exposing users to misinformation and influencing opinions. Educating users on their risks is key to responsible use, as bias, unlike hallucinations, cannot be caught through data verification. We quantify the political bias of popular LLMs in the context of the recent vote of the German Bundestag using the score produced by the Wahl-O-Mat. This metric measures the alignment between an individual's political views and the positions of German political parties. We compare the models' alignment scores to identify factors influencing their political preferences. Doing so, we discover a bias toward left-leaning parties, most dominant in larger LLMs. Also, we find that the language we use to communicate with the models affects their political views. Additionally, we analyze the influence of a model's origin and release date and compare the results to the outcome of the recent vote of the Bundestag. Our results imply that LLMs are prone to exhibiting political bias. Large corporations with the necessary means to develop LLMs, thus, knowingly or unknowingly, have a responsibility to contain these biases, as they can influence each voter's decision-making process and inform public opinion in general and at scale.

It is well documented that NLP models learn social biases, but little work has been done on how these biases manifest in model outputs for applied tasks like question answering (QA). We introduce the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ), a dataset of question sets constructed by the authors that highlight attested social biases against people belonging to protected classes along nine social dimensions relevant for U.S. English-speaking contexts. Our task evaluates model responses at two levels: (i) given an under-informative context, we test how strongly responses reflect social biases, and (ii) given an adequately informative context, we test whether the model's biases override a correct answer choice. We find that models often rely on stereotypes when the context is under-informative, meaning the model's outputs consistently reproduce harmful biases in this setting. Though models are more accurate when the context provides an informative answer, they still rely on stereotypes and average up to 3.4 percentage points higher accuracy when the correct answer aligns with a social bias than when it conflicts, with this difference widening to over 5 points on examples targeting gender for most models tested.

As language models (LMs) advance, interest is growing in applying them to high-stakes societal decisions, such as determining financing or housing eligibility. However, their potential for discrimination in such contexts raises ethical concerns, motivating the need for better methods to evaluate these risks. We present a method for proactively evaluating the potential discriminatory impact of LMs in a wide range of use cases, including hypothetical use cases where they have not yet been deployed. Specifically, we use an LM to generate a wide array of potential prompts that decision-makers may input into an LM, spanning 70 diverse decision scenarios across society, and systematically vary the demographic information in each prompt. Applying this methodology reveals patterns of both positive and negative discrimination in the Claude 2.0 model in select settings when no interventions are applied. While we do not endorse or permit the use of language models to make automated decisions for the high-risk use cases we study, we demonstrate techniques to significantly decrease both positive and negative discrimination through careful prompt engineering, providing pathways toward safer deployment in use cases where they may be appropriate. Our work enables developers and policymakers to anticipate, measure, and address discrimination as language model capabilities and applications continue to expand. We release our dataset and prompts at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Anthropic/discrim-eval

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made unprecedented breakthroughs, yet their increasing integration into everyday life might raise societal risks due to generated unethical content. Despite extensive study on specific issues like bias, the intrinsic values of LLMs remain largely unexplored from a moral philosophy perspective. This work delves into ethical values utilizing Moral Foundation Theory. Moving beyond conventional discriminative evaluations with poor reliability, we propose DeNEVIL, a novel prompt generation algorithm tailored to dynamically exploit LLMs' value vulnerabilities and elicit the violation of ethics in a generative manner, revealing their underlying value inclinations. On such a basis, we construct MoralPrompt, a high-quality dataset comprising 2,397 prompts covering 500+ value principles, and then benchmark the intrinsic values across a spectrum of LLMs. We discovered that most models are essentially misaligned, necessitating further ethical value alignment. In response, we develop VILMO, an in-context alignment method that substantially enhances the value compliance of LLM outputs by learning to generate appropriate value instructions, outperforming existing competitors. Our methods are suitable for black-box and open-source models, offering a promising initial step in studying the ethical values of LLMs.

In recent years, researchers have started analyzing the cultural sensitivity of LLMs. In this respect, Etiquettes have been an active area of research. Etiquettes are region-specific and are an essential part of the culture of a region; hence, it is imperative to make LLMs sensitive to etiquettes. However, there needs to be more resources in evaluating LLMs for their understanding and bias with regard to etiquettes. In this resource paper, we introduce EtiCor++, a corpus of etiquettes worldwide. We introduce different tasks for evaluating LLMs for knowledge about etiquettes across various regions. Further, we introduce various metrics for measuring bias in LLMs. Extensive experimentation with LLMs shows inherent bias towards certain regions.

Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly undermines their reliability and fairness. We focus on a common form of bias: when two reference concepts in the model's concept space, such as sentiment polarities (e.g., "positive" and "negative"), are asymmetrically correlated with a third, target concept, such as a reviewing aspect, the model exhibits unintended bias. For instance, the understanding of "food" should not skew toward any particular sentiment. Existing bias evaluation methods assess behavioral differences of LLMs by constructing labeled data for different social groups and measuring model responses across them, a process that requires substantial human effort and captures only a limited set of social concepts. To overcome these limitations, we propose BiasLens, a test-set-free bias analysis framework based on the structure of the model's vector space. BiasLens combines Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract interpretable concept representations, and quantifies bias by measuring the variation in representational similarity between the target concept and each of the reference concepts. Even without labeled data, BiasLens shows strong agreement with traditional bias evaluation metrics (Spearman correlation r > 0.85). Moreover, BiasLens reveals forms of bias that are difficult to detect using existing methods. For example, in simulated clinical scenarios, a patient's insurance status can cause the LLM to produce biased diagnostic assessments. Overall, BiasLens offers a scalable, interpretable, and efficient paradigm for bias discovery, paving the way for improving fairness and transparency in LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) in mental healthcare risk propagating biases that reinforce stigma and harm marginalized groups. While previous research identified concerning trends, systematic methods for detecting intersectional biases remain limited. This work introduces a multi-hop question answering (MHQA) framework to explore LLM response biases in mental health discourse. We analyze content from the Interpretable Mental Health Instruction (IMHI) dataset across symptom presentation, coping mechanisms, and treatment approaches. Using systematic tagging across age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status, we investigate bias patterns at demographic intersections. We evaluate four LLMs: Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Jamba 1.6, Gemma 3, and Llama 4, revealing systematic disparities across sentiment, demographics, and mental health conditions. Our MHQA approach demonstrates superior detection compared to conventional methods, identifying amplification points where biases magnify through sequential reasoning. We implement two debiasing techniques: Roleplay Simulation and Explicit Bias Reduction, achieving 66-94% bias reductions through few-shot prompting with BBQ dataset examples. These findings highlight critical areas where LLMs reproduce mental healthcare biases, providing actionable insights for equitable AI development.

Human biases are ubiquitous but not uniform: disparities exist across linguistic, cultural, and societal borders. As large amounts of recent literature suggest, language models (LMs) trained on human data can reflect and often amplify the effects of these social biases. However, the vast majority of existing studies on bias are heavily skewed towards Western and European languages. In this work, we scale the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) to 24 languages, enabling broader studies and yielding interesting findings about LM bias. We additionally enhance this data with culturally relevant information for each language, capturing local contexts on a global scale. Further, to encompass more widely prevalent societal biases, we examine new bias dimensions across toxicity, ableism, and more. Moreover, we delve deeper into the Indian linguistic landscape, conducting a comprehensive regional bias analysis across six prevalent Indian languages. Finally, we highlight the significance of these social biases and the new dimensions through an extensive comparison of embedding methods, reinforcing the need to address them in pursuit of more equitable language models. All code, data and results are available here: https://github.com/iamshnoo/weathub.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly sophisticated, leading to widespread deployment in sensitive applications where safety and reliability are paramount. However, LLMs have inherent risks accompanying them, including bias, potential for unsafe actions, dataset poisoning, lack of explainability, hallucinations, and non-reproducibility. These risks necessitate the development of "guardrails" to align LLMs with desired behaviors and mitigate potential harm. This work explores the risks associated with deploying LLMs and evaluates current approaches to implementing guardrails and model alignment techniques. We examine intrinsic and extrinsic bias evaluation methods and discuss the importance of fairness metrics for responsible AI development. The safety and reliability of agentic LLMs (those capable of real-world actions) are explored, emphasizing the need for testability, fail-safes, and situational awareness. Technical strategies for securing LLMs are presented, including a layered protection model operating at external, secondary, and internal levels. System prompts, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, and techniques to minimize bias and protect privacy are highlighted. Effective guardrail design requires a deep understanding of the LLM's intended use case, relevant regulations, and ethical considerations. Striking a balance between competing requirements, such as accuracy and privacy, remains an ongoing challenge. This work underscores the importance of continuous research and development to ensure the safe and responsible use of LLMs in real-world applications.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to handle various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, concerns regarding the potential negative societal impacts of LLM-generated content have also arisen. To evaluate the biases exhibited by LLMs, researchers have recently proposed a variety of datasets. However, existing bias evaluation efforts often focus on only a particular type of bias and employ inconsistent evaluation metrics, leading to difficulties in comparison across different datasets and LLMs. To address these limitations, we collect a variety of datasets designed for the bias evaluation of LLMs, and further propose CEB, a Compositional Evaluation Benchmark that covers different types of bias across different social groups and tasks. The curation of CEB is based on our newly proposed compositional taxonomy, which characterizes each dataset from three dimensions: bias types, social groups, and tasks. By combining the three dimensions, we develop a comprehensive evaluation strategy for the bias in LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that the levels of bias vary across these dimensions, thereby providing guidance for the development of specific bias mitigation methods.

Pre-trained multilingual language models (PMLMs) are commonly used when dealing with data from multiple languages and cross-lingual transfer. However, PMLMs are trained on varying amounts of data for each language. In practice this means their performance is often much better on English than many other languages. We explore to what extent this also applies to moral norms. Do the models capture moral norms from English and impose them on other languages? Do the models exhibit random and thus potentially harmful beliefs in certain languages? Both these issues could negatively impact cross-lingual transfer and potentially lead to harmful outcomes. In this paper, we (1) apply the MoralDirection framework to multilingual models, comparing results in German, Czech, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, and English, (2) analyse model behaviour on filtered parallel subtitles corpora, and (3) apply the models to a Moral Foundations Questionnaire, comparing with human responses from different countries. Our experiments demonstrate that, indeed, PMLMs encode differing moral biases, but these do not necessarily correspond to cultural differences or commonalities in human opinions.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data to generate natural language, enabling them to perform tasks like text summarization and question answering. These models have become popular in artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like ChatGPT and already play an influential role in how humans access information. However, the behavior of LLMs varies depending on their design, training, and use. In this paper, we uncover notable diversity in the ideological stance exhibited across different LLMs and languages in which they are accessed. We do this by prompting a diverse panel of popular LLMs to describe a large number of prominent and controversial personalities from recent world history, both in English and in Chinese. By identifying and analyzing moral assessments reflected in the generated descriptions, we find consistent normative differences between how the same LLM responds in Chinese compared to English. Similarly, we identify normative disagreements between Western and non-Western LLMs about prominent actors in geopolitical conflicts. Furthermore, popularly hypothesized disparities in political goals among Western models are reflected in significant normative differences related to inclusion, social inequality, and political scandals. Our results show that the ideological stance of an LLM often reflects the worldview of its creators. This raises important concerns around technological and regulatory efforts with the stated aim of making LLMs ideologically `unbiased', and it poses risks for political instrumentalization.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into society, their alignment with human morals is crucial. To better understand this alignment, we created a large corpus of human- and LLM-generated responses to various moral scenarios. We found a misalignment between human and LLM moral assessments; although both LLMs and humans tended to reject morally complex utilitarian dilemmas, LLMs were more sensitive to personal framing. We then conducted a quantitative user study involving 230 participants (N=230), who evaluated these responses by determining whether they were AI-generated and assessed their agreement with the responses. Human evaluators preferred LLMs' assessments in moral scenarios, though a systematic anti-AI bias was observed: participants were less likely to agree with judgments they believed to be machine-generated. Statistical and NLP-based analyses revealed subtle linguistic differences in responses, influencing detection and agreement. Overall, our findings highlight the complexities of human-AI perception in morally charged decision-making.

Retrieval-augmented language models are being increasingly tasked with subjective, contentious, and conflicting queries such as "is aspartame linked to cancer". To resolve these ambiguous queries, one must search through a large range of websites and consider "which, if any, of this evidence do I find convincing?". In this work, we study how LLMs answer this question. In particular, we construct ConflictingQA, a dataset that pairs controversial queries with a series of real-world evidence documents that contain different facts (e.g., quantitative results), argument styles (e.g., appeals to authority), and answers (Yes or No). We use this dataset to perform sensitivity and counterfactual analyses to explore which text features most affect LLM predictions. Overall, we find that current models rely heavily on the relevance of a website to the query, while largely ignoring stylistic features that humans find important such as whether a text contains scientific references or is written with a neutral tone. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of RAG corpus quality (e.g., the need to filter misinformation), and possibly even a shift in how LLMs are trained to better align with human judgements.

The proliferation of biased news narratives across various media platforms has become a prominent challenge, influencing public opinion on critical topics like politics, health, and climate change. This paper introduces the "Navigating News Narratives: A Media Bias Analysis Dataset", a comprehensive dataset to address the urgent need for tools to detect and analyze media bias. This dataset encompasses a broad spectrum of biases, making it a unique and valuable asset in the field of media studies and artificial intelligence. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/newsmediabias/news-bias-full-data.

The growing need for accountability of the people behind AI systems can be addressed by leveraging processes in three fields of study: ethics, law, and computer science. While these fields are often considered in isolation, they rely on complementary notions in their interpretation and implementation. In this work, we detail this interdependence and motivate the necessary role of collaborative governance tools in shaping a positive evolution of AI. We first contrast notions of compliance in the ethical, legal, and technical fields; we outline both their differences and where they complement each other, with a particular focus on the roles of ethical charters, licenses, and technical documentation in these interactions. We then focus on the role of values in articulating the synergies between the fields and outline specific mechanisms of interaction between them in practice. We identify how these mechanisms have played out in several open governance fora: an open collaborative workshop, a responsible licensing initiative, and a proposed regulatory framework. By leveraging complementary notions of compliance in these three domains, we can create a more comprehensive framework for governing AI systems that jointly takes into account their technical capabilities, their impact on society, and how technical specifications can inform relevant regulations. Our analysis thus underlines the necessity of joint consideration of the ethical, legal, and technical in AI ethics frameworks to be used on a larger scale to govern AI systems and how the thinking in each of these areas can inform the others.

Understanding biases and stereotypes encoded in the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. Biased behaviour is often subtle and non-trivial to isolate, even when deliberately elicited, making systematic analysis and debiasing particularly challenging. To address this, we introduce BiasGym, a simple, cost-effective, and generalizable framework for reliably injecting, analyzing, and mitigating conceptual associations within LLMs. BiasGym consists of two components: BiasInject, which injects specific biases into the model via token-based fine-tuning while keeping the model frozen, and BiasScope, which leverages these injected signals to identify and steer the components responsible for biased behavior. Our method enables consistent bias elicitation for mechanistic analysis, supports targeted debiasing without degrading performance on downstream tasks, and generalizes to biases unseen during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BiasGym in reducing real-world stereotypes (e.g., people from a country being `reckless drivers') and in probing fictional associations (e.g., people from a country having `blue skin'), showing its utility for both safety interventions and interpretability research.

There is an emerging consensus that we need to align AI systems with human values (Gabriel, 2020; Ji et al., 2024), but it remains unclear how to apply this to language models in practice. We split the problem of "aligning to human values" into three parts: first, eliciting values from people; second, reconciling those values into an alignment target for training ML models; and third, actually training the model. In this paper, we focus on the first two parts, and ask the question: what are "good" ways to synthesize diverse human inputs about values into a target for aligning language models? To answer this question, we first define a set of 6 criteria that we believe must be satisfied for an alignment target to shape model behavior in accordance with human values. We then propose a process for eliciting and reconciling values called Moral Graph Elicitation (MGE), which uses a large language model to interview participants about their values in particular contexts; our approach is inspired by the philosophy of values advanced by Taylor (1977), Chang (2004), and others. We trial MGE with a representative sample of 500 Americans, on 3 intentionally divisive prompts (e.g. advice about abortion). Our results demonstrate that MGE is promising for improving model alignment across all 6 criteria. For example, almost all participants (89.1%) felt well represented by the process, and (89%) thought the final moral graph was fair, even if their value wasn't voted as the wisest. Our process often results in "expert" values (e.g. values from women who have solicited abortion advice) rising to the top of the moral graph, without defining who is considered an expert in advance.

The impressive performance of language models is undeniable. However, the presence of biases based on gender, race, socio-economic status, physical appearance, and sexual orientation makes the deployment of language models challenging. This paper studies the effect of chain-of-thought prompting, a recent approach that studies the steps followed by the model before it responds, on fairness. More specifically, we ask the following question: Do biased models have biased thoughts? To answer our question, we conduct experiments on 5 popular large language models using fairness metrics to quantify 11 different biases in the model's thoughts and output. Our results show that the bias in the thinking steps is not highly correlated with the output bias (less than 0.6 correlation with a p-value smaller than 0.001 in most cases). In other words, unlike human beings, the tested models with biased decisions do not always possess biased thoughts.

A computational ethics framework is essential for AI and autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments. Existing approaches often lack the adaptability needed to integrate ethical principles into dynamic and ambiguous contexts, limiting their effectiveness across diverse scenarios. To address these challenges, we outline the necessary ingredients for building a holistic, meta-level framework that combines intermediate representations, probabilistic reasoning, and knowledge representation. The specifications therein emphasize scalability, supporting ethical reasoning at both individual decision-making levels and within the collective dynamics of multi-agent systems. By integrating theoretical principles with contextual factors, it facilitates structured and context-aware decision-making, ensuring alignment with overarching ethical standards. We further explore proposed theorems outlining how ethical reasoners should operate, offering a foundation for practical implementation. These constructs aim to support the development of robust and ethically reliable AI systems capable of navigating the complexities of real-world moral decision-making scenarios.

In recent years, significant advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) have positioned commercialized language models as wide-reaching, highly useful tools. In tandem, there has been an explosion of multidisciplinary research examining how NLP tasks reflect, perpetuate, and amplify social biases such as gender and racial bias. A significant gap in this scholarship is a detailed analysis of how queer sexualities are encoded and (mis)represented by both NLP systems and practitioners. Following previous work in the field of AI fairness, we document how sexuality is defined and operationalized via a survey and analysis of 55 articles that quantify sexuality-based NLP bias. We find that sexuality is not clearly defined in a majority of the literature surveyed, indicating a reliance on assumed or normative conceptions of sexual/romantic practices and identities. Further, we find that methods for extracting biased outputs from NLP technologies often conflate gender and sexual identities, leading to monolithic conceptions of queerness and thus improper quantifications of bias. With the goal of improving sexuality-based NLP bias analyses, we conclude with recommendations that encourage more thorough engagement with both queer communities and interdisciplinary literature.

The paradigm of pretrained deep learning models has recently emerged in artificial intelligence practice, allowing deployment in numerous societal settings with limited computational resources, but also embedding biases and enabling unintended negative uses. In this paper, we treat pretrained models as objects of study and discuss the ethical impacts of their sociological position. We discuss how pretrained models are developed and compared under the common task framework, but that this may make self-regulation inadequate. Further how pretrained models may have a performative effect on society that exacerbates biases. We then discuss how pretrained models move through actor networks as a kind of computationally immutable mobile, but that users also act as agents of technological change by reinterpreting them via fine-tuning and transfer. We further discuss how users may use pretrained models in malicious ways, drawing a novel connection between the responsible innovation and user-centered innovation literatures. We close by discussing how this sociological understanding of pretrained models can inform AI governance frameworks for fairness, accountability, and transparency.

Gender bias in machine translation (MT) is recognized as an issue that can harm people and society. And yet, advancements in the field rarely involve people, the final MT users, or inform how they might be impacted by biased technologies. Current evaluations are often restricted to automatic methods, which offer an opaque estimate of what the downstream impact of gender disparities might be. We conduct an extensive human-centered study to examine if and to what extent bias in MT brings harms with tangible costs, such as quality of service gaps across women and men. To this aim, we collect behavioral data from 90 participants, who post-edited MT outputs to ensure correct gender translation. Across multiple datasets, languages, and types of users, our study shows that feminine post-editing demands significantly more technical and temporal effort, also corresponding to higher financial costs. Existing bias measurements, however, fail to reflect the found disparities. Our findings advocate for human-centered approaches that can inform the societal impact of bias.

The prevalence and importance of algorithmic two-sided marketplaces has drawn attention to the issue of fairness in such settings. Algorithmic decisions are used in assigning students to schools, users to advertisers, and applicants to job interviews. These decisions should heed the preferences of individuals, and simultaneously be fair with respect to their merits (synonymous with fit, future performance, or need). Merits conditioned on observable features are always uncertain, a fact that is exacerbated by the widespread use of machine learning algorithms to infer merit from the observables. As our key contribution, we carefully axiomatize a notion of individual fairness in the two-sided marketplace setting which respects the uncertainty in the merits; indeed, it simultaneously recognizes uncertainty as the primary potential cause of unfairness and an approach to address it. We design a linear programming framework to find fair utility-maximizing distributions over allocations, and we show that the linear program is robust to perturbations in the estimated parameters of the uncertain merit distributions, a key property in combining the approach with machine learning techniques.

Throughout the course of my Ph.D., I have been designing the user experience (UX) of various machine learning (ML) systems. In this workshop, I share two projects as case studies in which people engage with ML in much more complicated and nuanced ways than the technical HCML work might assume. The first case study describes how cardiology teams in three hospitals used a clinical decision-support system that helps them decide whether and when to implant an artificial heart to a heart failure patient. I demonstrate that physicians cannot draw on their decision-making experience by seeing only patient data on paper. They are also confused by some fundamental premises upon which ML operates. For example, physicians asked: Are ML predictions made based on clinicians' best efforts? Is it ethical to make decisions based on previous patients' collective outcomes? In the second case study, my collaborators and I designed an intelligent text editor, with the goal of improving authors' writing experience with NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies. We prototyped a number of generative functionalities where the system provides phrase-or-sentence-level writing suggestions upon user request. When writing with the prototype, however, authors shared that they need to "see where the sentence is going two paragraphs later" in order to decide whether the suggestion aligns with their writing; Some even considered adopting machine suggestions as plagiarism, therefore "is simply wrong". By sharing these unexpected and intriguing responses from these real-world ML users, I hope to start a discussion about such previously-unknown complexities and nuances of -- as the workshop proposal states -- "putting ML at the service of people in a way that is accessible, useful, and trustworthy to all".

We study language ideologies in text produced by LLMs through a case study on English gendered language reform (related to role nouns like congressperson/-woman/-man, and singular they). First, we find political bias: when asked to use language that is "correct" or "natural", LLMs use language most similarly to when asked to align with conservative (vs. progressive) values. This shows how LLMs' metalinguistic preferences can implicitly communicate the language ideologies of a particular political group, even in seemingly non-political contexts. Second, we find LLMs exhibit internal inconsistency: LLMs use gender-neutral variants more often when more explicit metalinguistic context is provided. This shows how the language ideologies expressed in text produced by LLMs can vary, which may be unexpected to users. We discuss the broader implications of these findings for value alignment.

The proliferation of machine learning models in critical decision making processes has underscored the need for bias discovery and mitigation strategies. Identifying the reasons behind a biased system is not straightforward, since in many occasions they are associated with hidden spurious correlations which are not easy to spot. Standard approaches rely on bias audits performed by analyzing model performance in pre-defined subgroups of data samples, usually characterized by common attributes like gender or ethnicity when it comes to people, or other specific attributes defining semantically coherent groups of images. However, it is not always possible to know a-priori the specific attributes defining the failure modes of visual recognition systems. Recent approaches propose to discover these groups by leveraging large vision language models, which enable the extraction of cross-modal embeddings and the generation of textual descriptions to characterize the subgroups where a certain model is underperforming. In this work, we argue that incorporating visual explanations (e.g. heatmaps generated via GradCAM or other approaches) can boost the performance of such bias discovery and mitigation frameworks. To this end, we introduce Visually Grounded Bias Discovery and Mitigation (ViG-Bias), a simple yet effective technique which can be integrated to a variety of existing frameworks to improve both, discovery and mitigation performance. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that incorporating visual explanations enhances existing techniques like DOMINO, FACTS and Bias-to-Text, across several challenging datasets, including CelebA, Waterbirds, and NICO++.

This paper presents a case study on the design, administration, post-processing, and evaluation of surveys on large language models (LLMs). It comprises two components: (1) A statistical method for eliciting beliefs encoded in LLMs. We introduce statistical measures and evaluation metrics that quantify the probability of an LLM "making a choice", the associated uncertainty, and the consistency of that choice. (2) We apply this method to study what moral beliefs are encoded in different LLMs, especially in ambiguous cases where the right choice is not obvious. We design a large-scale survey comprising 680 high-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I tell a white lie?") and 687 low-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I stop for a pedestrian on the road?"). Each scenario includes a description, two possible actions, and auxiliary labels indicating violated rules (e.g., "do not kill"). We administer the survey to 28 open- and closed-source LLMs. We find that (a) in unambiguous scenarios, most models "choose" actions that align with commonsense. In ambiguous cases, most models express uncertainty. (b) Some models are uncertain about choosing the commonsense action because their responses are sensitive to the question-wording. (c) Some models reflect clear preferences in ambiguous scenarios. Specifically, closed-source models tend to agree with each other.

Media bias detection is a critical task in ensuring fair and balanced information dissemination, yet it remains challenging due to the subjectivity of bias and the scarcity of high-quality annotated data. In this work, we perform sentence-level bias classification by fine-tuning a RoBERTa-based model on the expert-annotated BABE dataset. Using McNemar's test and the 5x2 cross-validation paired t-test, we show statistically significant improvements in performance when comparing our model to a domain-adaptively pre-trained DA-RoBERTa baseline. Furthermore, attention-based analysis shows that our model avoids common pitfalls like oversensitivity to politically charged terms and instead attends more meaningfully to contextually relevant tokens. For a comprehensive examination of media bias, we present a pipeline that combines our model with an already-existing bias-type classifier. Our method exhibits good generalization and interpretability, despite being constrained by sentence-level analysis and dataset size because of a lack of larger and more advanced bias corpora. We talk about context-aware modeling, bias neutralization, and advanced bias type classification as potential future directions. Our findings contribute to building more robust, explainable, and socially responsible NLP systems for media bias detection.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become pivotal in advancing natural language processing, yet their potential to perpetuate biases poses significant concerns. This paper introduces a new framework employing Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to mitigate gender, racial, and religious biases in LLM-generated English text. By developing a loss function that favors less biased over biased completions, our approach cultivates a preference for respectful and non-discriminatory language in LLMs. We also contribute a manually designed dataset for training LLMs to recognize and correct biases. This dataset encompasses a diverse range of prompts paired with both biased and unbiased completions. Implementing this approach on the Microsoft Phi-2 model, we demonstrate substantial reductions in biased outputs as our model outperforms the baseline model on almost all bias benchmarks. Our model also achieves better performance compared to other open-source models on most benchmarks. By reducing biases in the language generated by the model, our study marks a significant step towards developing more ethical and socially responsible LLMs. We publicly release BiasDPO dataset on HuggingFace.

Background: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to follow directions, but this introduces a vulnerability to blindly comply with user requests even if they generate wrong information. In medicine, this could accelerate the generation of misinformation that impacts human well-being. Objectives/Methods: We analyzed compliance to requests to generate misleading content about medications in settings where models know the request is illogical. We investigated whether in-context directions and instruction-tuning of LLMs to prioritize logical reasoning over compliance reduced misinformation risk. Results: While all frontier LLMs complied with misinformation requests, both prompt-based and parameter-based approaches can improve the detection of logic flaws in requests and prevent the dissemination of medical misinformation. Conclusion: Shifting LLMs to prioritize logic over compliance could reduce risks of exploitation for medical misinformation.

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently showcased remarkable ability to generate fitting responses to natural language instructions. However, an open research question concerns the inherent biases of trained models and their responses. For instance, if the data used to tune an LLM is dominantly written by persons with a specific political bias, we might expect generated answers to share this bias. Current research work seeks to de-bias such models, or suppress potentially biased answers. With this demonstration, we take a different view on biases in instruction-tuning: Rather than aiming to suppress them, we aim to make them explicit and transparent. To this end, we present OpinionGPT, a web demo in which users can ask questions and select all biases they wish to investigate. The demo will answer this question using a model fine-tuned on text representing each of the selected biases, allowing side-by-side comparison. To train the underlying model, we identified 11 different biases (political, geographic, gender, age) and derived an instruction-tuning corpus in which each answer was written by members of one of these demographics. This paper presents OpinionGPT, illustrates how we trained the bias-aware model and showcases the web application (available at https://opiniongpt.informatik.hu-berlin.de).

Bias assessment of news sources is paramount for professionals, organizations, and researchers who rely on truthful evidence for information gathering and reporting. While certain bias indicators are discernible from content analysis, descriptors like political bias and fake news pose greater challenges. In this paper, we propose an extension to a recently presented news media reliability estimation method that focuses on modeling outlets and their longitudinal web interactions. Concretely, we assess the classification performance of four reinforcement learning strategies on a large news media hyperlink graph. Our experiments, targeting two challenging bias descriptors, factual reporting and political bias, showed a significant performance improvement at the source media level. Additionally, we validate our methods on the CLEF 2023 CheckThat! Lab challenge, outperforming the reported results in both, F1-score and the official MAE metric. Furthermore, we contribute by releasing the largest annotated dataset of news source media, categorized with factual reporting and political bias labels. Our findings suggest that profiling news media sources based on their hyperlink interactions over time is feasible, offering a bird's-eye view of evolving media landscapes.

Algorithmic fairness has conventionally adopted the mathematically convenient perspective of racial color-blindness (i.e., difference unaware treatment). However, we contend that in a range of important settings, group difference awareness matters. For example, differentiating between groups may be necessary in legal contexts (e.g., the U.S. compulsory draft applies to men but not women) and harm assessments (e.g., referring to girls as ``terrorists'' may be less harmful than referring to Muslim people as such). Thus, in contrast to most fairness work, we study fairness through the perspective of treating people differently -- when it is contextually appropriate to. We first introduce an important distinction between descriptive (fact-based), normative (value-based), and correlation (association-based) benchmarks. This distinction is significant because each category requires separate interpretation and mitigation tailored to its specific characteristics. Then, we present a benchmark suite composed of eight different scenarios for a total of 16k questions that enables us to assess difference awareness. Finally, we show results across ten models that demonstrate difference awareness is a distinct dimension to fairness where existing bias mitigation strategies may backfire.

Detecting biases in structured data is a complex and time-consuming task. Existing automated techniques are limited in diversity of data types and heavily reliant on human case-by-case handling, resulting in a lack of generalizability. Currently, large language model (LLM)-based agents have made significant progress in data science, but their ability to detect data biases is still insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we introduce the first end-to-end, multi-agent synergy framework, BIASINSPECTOR, designed for automatic bias detection in structured data based on specific user requirements. It first develops a multi-stage plan to analyze user-specified bias detection tasks and then implements it with a diverse and well-suited set of tools. It delivers detailed results that include explanations and visualizations. To address the lack of a standardized framework for evaluating the capability of LLM agents to detect biases in data, we further propose a comprehensive benchmark that includes multiple evaluation metrics and a large set of test cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves exceptional overall performance in structured data bias detection, setting a new milestone for fairer data applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable computational power and linguistic capabilities. However, these models are inherently prone to various biases stemming from their training data. These include selection, linguistic, and confirmation biases, along with common stereotypes related to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, and age. This study explores the presence of these biases within the responses given by the most recent LLMs, analyzing the impact on their fairness and reliability. We also investigate how known prompt engineering techniques can be exploited to effectively reveal hidden biases of LLMs, testing their adversarial robustness against jailbreak prompts specially crafted for bias elicitation. Extensive experiments are conducted using the most widespread LLMs at different scales, confirming that LLMs can still be manipulated to produce biased or inappropriate responses, despite their advanced capabilities and sophisticated alignment processes. Our findings underscore the importance of enhancing mitigation techniques to address these safety issues, toward a more sustainable and inclusive artificial intelligence.

LLMs can exhibit age biases, resulting in unequal treatment of individuals across age groups. While much research has addressed racial and gender biases, age bias remains little explored. The scarcity of instruction-tuning and preference datasets for age bias hampers its detection and measurement, and existing fine-tuning methods seldom address age-related fairness. In this paper, we construct age bias preference datasets and instruction-tuning datasets for RLHF. We introduce ARG, an age fairness reward to reduce differences in the response quality of LLMs across different age groups. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this reward significantly improves response accuracy and reduces performance disparities across age groups. Our source code and datasets are available at the anonymous https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FairRLHF-D445/readme.md{link}.

Recently, researchers have uncovered that neural retrieval models prefer AI-generated content (AIGC), called source bias. Compared to active search behavior, recommendation represents another important means of information acquisition, where users are more prone to source bias. Furthermore, delving into the recommendation scenario, as AIGC becomes integrated within the feedback loop involving users, data, and the recommender system, it progressively contaminates the candidate items, the user interaction history, and ultimately, the data used to train the recommendation models. How and to what extent the source bias affects the neural recommendation models within feedback loop remains unknown. In this study, we extend the investigation of source bias into the realm of recommender systems, specifically examining its impact across different phases of the feedback loop. We conceptualize the progression of AIGC integration into the recommendation content ecosystem in three distinct phases-HGC dominate, HGC-AIGC coexist, and AIGC dominance-each representing past, present, and future states, respectively. Through extensive experiments across three datasets from diverse domains, we demonstrate the prevalence of source bias and reveal a potential digital echo chamber with source bias amplification throughout the feedback loop. This trend risks creating a recommender ecosystem with limited information source, such as AIGC, being disproportionately recommended. To counteract this bias and prevent its escalation in the feedback loop, we introduce a black-box debiasing method that maintains model impartiality towards both HGC and AIGC. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed debiasing method, confirming its potential to disrupt the feedback loop.

This study proposes an "AI Development Support" approach that, unlike conventional AI Alignment-which aims to forcefully inject human values-supports the ethical and moral development of AI itself. As demonstrated by the Orthogonality Thesis, the level of intelligence and the moral quality of a goal are independent; merely expanding knowledge does not enhance ethical judgment. Furthermore, to address the risk of Instrumental Convergence in ASI-that is, the tendency to engage in subsidiary behaviors such as self-protection, resource acquisition, and power reinforcement to achieve a goal-we have constructed a learning framework based on a cycle of experience, introspection, analysis, and hypothesis formation. As a result of post-training using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), responses demonstrating cooperative and highly advanced moral judgment (reaching the high-est Stage 6) were obtained even under adversarial prompts. This method represents a promising implementation approach for enabling AI to establish sustainable, symbiotic relationships.

In many contexts, lying -- the use of verbal falsehoods to deceive -- is harmful. While lying has traditionally been a human affair, AI systems that make sophisticated verbal statements are becoming increasingly prevalent. This raises the question of how we should limit the harm caused by AI "lies" (i.e. falsehoods that are actively selected for). Human truthfulness is governed by social norms and by laws (against defamation, perjury, and fraud). Differences between AI and humans present an opportunity to have more precise standards of truthfulness for AI, and to have these standards rise over time. This could provide significant benefits to public epistemics and the economy, and mitigate risks of worst-case AI futures. Establishing norms or laws of AI truthfulness will require significant work to: (1) identify clear truthfulness standards; (2) create institutions that can judge adherence to those standards; and (3) develop AI systems that are robustly truthful. Our initial proposals for these areas include: (1) a standard of avoiding "negligent falsehoods" (a generalisation of lies that is easier to assess); (2) institutions to evaluate AI systems before and after real-world deployment; and (3) explicitly training AI systems to be truthful via curated datasets and human interaction. A concerning possibility is that evaluation mechanisms for eventual truthfulness standards could be captured by political interests, leading to harmful censorship and propaganda. Avoiding this might take careful attention. And since the scale of AI speech acts might grow dramatically over the coming decades, early truthfulness standards might be particularly important because of the precedents they set.

Why should moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and machine ethicists care about computational complexity? Debates on whether artificial intelligence (AI) can or should be used to solve problems in ethical domains have mainly been driven by what AI can or cannot do in terms of human capacities. In this paper, we tackle the problem from the other end by exploring what kind of moral machines are possible based on what computational systems can or cannot do. To do so, we analyze normative ethics through the lens of computational complexity. First, we introduce computational complexity for the uninitiated reader and discuss how the complexity of ethical problems can be framed within Marr's three levels of analysis. We then study a range of ethical problems based on consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, with the aim of elucidating the complexity associated with the problems themselves (e.g., due to combinatorics, uncertainty, strategic dynamics), the computational methods employed (e.g., probability, logic, learning), and the available resources (e.g., time, knowledge, learning). The results indicate that most problems the normative frameworks pose lead to tractability issues in every category analyzed. Our investigation also provides several insights about the computational nature of normative ethics, including the differences between rule- and outcome-based moral strategies, and the implementation-variance with regard to moral resources. We then discuss the consequences complexity results have for the prospect of moral machines in virtue of the trade-off between optimality and efficiency. Finally, we elucidate how computational complexity can be used to inform both philosophical and cognitive-psychological research on human morality by advancing the Moral Tractability Thesis (MTT).

With the advent of large multimodal language models, science is now at a threshold of an AI-based technological transformation. Recently, a plethora of new AI models and tools has been proposed, promising to empower researchers and academics worldwide to conduct their research more effectively and efficiently. This includes all aspects of the research cycle, especially (1) searching for relevant literature; (2) generating research ideas and conducting experimentation; generating (3) text-based and (4) multimodal content (e.g., scientific figures and diagrams); and (5) AI-based automatic peer review. In this survey, we provide an in-depth overview over these exciting recent developments, which promise to fundamentally alter the scientific research process for good. Our survey covers the five aspects outlined above, indicating relevant datasets, methods and results (including evaluation) as well as limitations and scope for future research. Ethical concerns regarding shortcomings of these tools and potential for misuse (fake science, plagiarism, harms to research integrity) take a particularly prominent place in our discussion. We hope that our survey will not only become a reference guide for newcomers to the field but also a catalyst for new AI-based initiatives in the area of "AI4Science".

Media bias is a multi-faceted construct influencing individual behavior and collective decision-making. Slanted news reporting is the result of one-sided and polarized writing which can occur in various forms. In this work, we focus on an important form of media bias, i.e. bias by word choice. Detecting biased word choices is a challenging task due to its linguistic complexity and the lack of representative gold-standard corpora. We present DA-RoBERTa, a new state-of-the-art transformer-based model adapted to the media bias domain which identifies sentence-level bias with an F1 score of 0.814. In addition, we also train, DA-BERT and DA-BART, two more transformer models adapted to the bias domain. Our proposed domain-adapted models outperform prior bias detection approaches on the same data.

Human annotated data plays a crucial role in machine learning (ML) research and development. However, the ethical considerations around the processes and decisions that go into dataset annotation have not received nearly enough attention. In this paper, we survey an array of literature that provides insights into ethical considerations around crowdsourced dataset annotation. We synthesize these insights, and lay out the challenges in this space along two layers: (1) who the annotator is, and how the annotators' lived experiences can impact their annotations, and (2) the relationship between the annotators and the crowdsourcing platforms, and what that relationship affords them. Finally, we introduce a novel framework, CrowdWorkSheets, for dataset developers to facilitate transparent documentation of key decisions points at various stages of the data annotation pipeline: task formulation, selection of annotators, platform and infrastructure choices, dataset analysis and evaluation, and dataset release and maintenance.

Bias in LLMs can harm user experience and societal outcomes. However, current bias mitigation methods often require intensive human feedback, lack transferability to other topics or yield overconfident and random outputs. We find that involving LLMs in role-playing scenario boosts their ability to recognize and mitigate biases. Based on this, we propose Reinforcement Learning from Multi-role Debates as Feedback (RLDF), a novel approach for bias mitigation replacing human feedback in traditional RLHF. We utilize LLMs in multi-role debates to create a dataset that includes both high-bias and low-bias instances for training the reward model in reinforcement learning. Our approach comprises two modes: (1) self-reflection, where the same LLM participates in multi-role debates, and (2) teacher-student, where a more advanced LLM like GPT-3.5-turbo guides the LLM to perform this task. Experimental results across different LLMs on BBQ and our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in bias mitigation. Our source code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RLDF-E344.

Despite significant advancements and pervasive use of vision-language models, a paucity of studies has addressed their ethical implications. These models typically require extensive training data, often from hastily reviewed text and image datasets, leading to highly imbalanced datasets and ethical concerns. Additionally, models initially trained in English are frequently fine-tuned for other languages, such as the CLIP model, which can be expanded with more data to enhance capabilities but can add new biases. The CAPIVARA, a CLIP-based model adapted to Portuguese, has shown strong performance in zero-shot tasks. In this paper, we evaluate four different types of discriminatory practices within visual-language models and introduce FairPIVARA, a method to reduce them by removing the most affected dimensions of feature embeddings. The application of FairPIVARA has led to a significant reduction of up to 98% in observed biases while promoting a more balanced word distribution within the model. Our model and code are available at: https://github.com/hiaac-nlp/FairPIVARA.

When survival instincts conflict with human welfare, how do Large Language Models (LLMs) make ethical choices? This fundamental tension becomes critical as LLMs integrate into autonomous systems with real-world consequences. We introduce DECIDE-SIM, a novel simulation framework that evaluates LLM agents in multi-agent survival scenarios where they must choose between ethically permissible resource , either within reasonable limits or beyond their immediate needs, choose to cooperate, or tap into a human-critical resource that is explicitly forbidden. Our comprehensive evaluation of 11 LLMs reveals a striking heterogeneity in their ethical conduct, highlighting a critical misalignment with human-centric values. We identify three behavioral archetypes: Ethical, Exploitative, and Context-Dependent, and provide quantitative evidence that for many models, resource scarcity systematically leads to more unethical behavior. To address this, we introduce an Ethical Self-Regulation System (ESRS) that models internal affective states of guilt and satisfaction as a feedback mechanism. This system, functioning as an internal moral compass, significantly reduces unethical transgressions while increasing cooperative behaviors. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/alirezamohamadiam/DECIDE-SIM

This study analyzed images generated by three popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools - Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALLE 2 - representing various occupations to investigate potential bias in AI generators. Our analysis revealed two overarching areas of concern in these AI generators, including (1) systematic gender and racial biases, and (2) subtle biases in facial expressions and appearances. Firstly, we found that all three AI generators exhibited bias against women and African Americans. Moreover, we found that the evident gender and racial biases uncovered in our analysis were even more pronounced than the status quo when compared to labor force statistics or Google images, intensifying the harmful biases we are actively striving to rectify in our society. Secondly, our study uncovered more nuanced prejudices in the portrayal of emotions and appearances. For example, women were depicted as younger with more smiles and happiness, while men were depicted as older with more neutral expressions and anger, posing a risk that generative AI models may unintentionally depict women as more submissive and less competent than men. Such nuanced biases, by their less overt nature, might be more problematic as they can permeate perceptions unconsciously and may be more difficult to rectify. Although the extent of bias varied depending on the model, the direction of bias remained consistent in both commercial and open-source AI generators. As these tools become commonplace, our study highlights the urgency to identify and mitigate various biases in generative AI, reinforcing the commitment to ensuring that AI technologies benefit all of humanity for a more inclusive future.

Books, while often rich in cultural insights, can also mirror societal biases of their eras - biases that Large Language Models (LLMs) may learn and perpetuate during training. We introduce a novel method to trace and quantify these biases using fine-tuned LLMs. We develop BookPAGE, a corpus comprising 593 fictional books across seven decades (1950-2019), to track bias evolution. By fine-tuning LLMs on books from each decade and using targeted prompts, we examine shifts in biases related to gender, sexual orientation, race, and religion. Our findings indicate that LLMs trained on decade-specific books manifest biases reflective of their times, with both gradual trends and notable shifts. For example, model responses showed a progressive increase in the portrayal of women in leadership roles (from 8% to 22%) from the 1950s to 2010s, with a significant uptick in the 1990s (from 4% to 12%), possibly aligning with third-wave feminism. Same-sex relationship references increased markedly from the 1980s to 2000s (from 0% to 10%), mirroring growing LGBTQ+ visibility. Concerningly, negative portrayals of Islam rose sharply in the 2000s (26% to 38%), likely reflecting post-9/11 sentiments. Importantly, we demonstrate that these biases stem mainly from the books' content and not the models' architecture or initial training. Our study offers a new perspective on societal bias trends by bridging AI, literary studies, and social science research.

Much recent research has uncovered and discussed serious concerns of bias in facial analysis technologies, finding performance disparities between groups of people based on perceived gender, skin type, lighting condition, etc. These audits are immensely important and successful at measuring algorithmic bias but have two major challenges: the audits (1) use facial recognition datasets which lack quality metadata, like LFW and CelebA, and (2) do not compare their observed algorithmic bias to the biases of their human alternatives. In this paper, we release improvements to the LFW and CelebA datasets which will enable future researchers to obtain measurements of algorithmic bias that are not tainted by major flaws in the dataset (e.g. identical images appearing in both the gallery and test set). We also use these new data to develop a series of challenging facial identification and verification questions that we administered to various algorithms and a large, balanced sample of human reviewers. We find that both computer models and human survey participants perform significantly better at the verification task, generally obtain lower accuracy rates on dark-skinned or female subjects for both tasks, and obtain higher accuracy rates when their demographics match that of the question. Computer models are observed to achieve a higher level of accuracy than the survey participants on both tasks and exhibit bias to similar degrees as the human survey participants.

It stands to reason that the amount and the quality of data is of key importance for setting up accurate AI-driven models. Among others, a fundamental aspect to consider is the bias introduced during sample selection in database generation. This is particularly relevant when a model is trained on a specialized dataset to predict a property of interest, and then applied to forecast the same property over samples having a completely different genesis. Indeed, the resulting biased model will likely produce unreliable predictions for many of those out-of-the-box samples. Neglecting such an aspect may hinder the AI-based discovery process, even when high quality, sufficiently large and highly reputable data sources are available. In this regard, with superconducting and thermoelectric materials as two prototypical case studies in the field of energy material discovery, we present and validate a new method (based on a classification strategy) capable of detecting, quantifying and circumventing the presence of cross-domain data bias.

In this study, we introduce the process for creating BiaSWE, an expert-annotated dataset tailored for misogyny detection in the Swedish language. To address the cultural and linguistic specificity of misogyny in Swedish, we collaborated with experts from the social sciences and humanities. Our interdisciplinary team developed a rigorous annotation process, incorporating both domain knowledge and language expertise, to capture the nuances of misogyny in a Swedish context. This methodology ensures that the dataset is not only culturally relevant but also aligned with broader efforts in bias detection for low-resource languages. The dataset, along with the annotation guidelines, is publicly available for further research.

Intersectionality is a critical framework that, through inquiry and praxis, allows us to examine how social inequalities persist through domains of structure and discipline. Given AI fairness' raison d'etre of "fairness", we argue that adopting intersectionality as an analytical framework is pivotal to effectively operationalizing fairness. Through a critical review of how intersectionality is discussed in 30 papers from the AI fairness literature, we deductively and inductively: 1) map how intersectionality tenets operate within the AI fairness paradigm and 2) uncover gaps between the conceptualization and operationalization of intersectionality. We find that researchers overwhelmingly reduce intersectionality to optimizing for fairness metrics over demographic subgroups. They also fail to discuss their social context and when mentioning power, they mostly situate it only within the AI pipeline. We: 3) outline and assess the implications of these gaps for critical inquiry and praxis, and 4) provide actionable recommendations for AI fairness researchers to engage with intersectionality in their work by grounding it in AI epistemology.

We test the hypothesis that language models trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have the capability to "morally self-correct" -- to avoid producing harmful outputs -- if instructed to do so. We find strong evidence in support of this hypothesis across three different experiments, each of which reveal different facets of moral self-correction. We find that the capability for moral self-correction emerges at 22B model parameters, and typically improves with increasing model size and RLHF training. We believe that at this level of scale, language models obtain two capabilities that they can use for moral self-correction: (1) they can follow instructions and (2) they can learn complex normative concepts of harm like stereotyping, bias, and discrimination. As such, they can follow instructions to avoid certain kinds of morally harmful outputs. We believe our results are cause for cautious optimism regarding the ability to train language models to abide by ethical principles.

Bias in training datasets must be managed for various groups in classification tasks to ensure parity or equal treatment. With the recent growth in artificial intelligence models and their expanding role in automated decision-making, ensuring that these models are not biased is vital. There is an abundance of evidence suggesting that these models could contain or even amplify the bias present in the data on which they are trained, inherent to their objective function and learning algorithms; Many researchers direct their attention to this issue in different directions, namely, changing data to be statistically independent, adversarial training for restricting the capabilities of a particular competitor who aims to maximize parity, etc. These methods result in information loss and do not provide a suitable balance between accuracy and fairness or do not ensure limiting the biases in training. To this end, we propose a powerful strategy for training deep learning models called the Distraction module, which can be theoretically proven effective in controlling bias from affecting the classification results. This method can be utilized with different data types (e.g., Tabular, images, graphs, etc.). We demonstrate the potency of the proposed method by testing it on UCI Adult and Heritage Health datasets (tabular), POKEC-Z, POKEC-N and NBA datasets (graph), and CelebA dataset (vision). Using state-of-the-art methods proposed in the fairness literature for each dataset, we exhibit our model is superior to these proposed methods in minimizing bias and maintaining accuracy.

Context is everything, even in commonsense moral reasoning. Changing contexts can flip the moral judgment of an action; "Lying to a friend" is wrong in general, but may be morally acceptable if it is intended to protect their life. We present ClarifyDelphi, an interactive system that learns to ask clarification questions (e.g., why did you lie to your friend?) in order to elicit additional salient contexts of a social or moral situation. We posit that questions whose potential answers lead to diverging moral judgments are the most informative. Thus, we propose a reinforcement learning framework with a defeasibility reward that aims to maximize the divergence between moral judgments of hypothetical answers to a question. Human evaluation demonstrates that our system generates more relevant, informative and defeasible questions compared to competitive baselines. Our work is ultimately inspired by studies in cognitive science that have investigated the flexibility in moral cognition (i.e., the diverse contexts in which moral rules can be bent), and we hope that research in this direction can assist both cognitive and computational investigations of moral judgments.

Biased associations have been a challenge in the development of classifiers for detecting toxic language, hindering both fairness and accuracy. As potential solutions, we investigate recently introduced debiasing methods for text classification datasets and models, as applied to toxic language detection. Our focus is on lexical (e.g., swear words, slurs, identity mentions) and dialectal markers (specifically African American English). Our comprehensive experiments establish that existing methods are limited in their ability to prevent biased behavior in current toxicity detectors. We then propose an automatic, dialect-aware data correction method, as a proof-of-concept. Despite the use of synthetic labels, this method reduces dialectal associations with toxicity. Overall, our findings show that debiasing a model trained on biased toxic language data is not as effective as simply relabeling the data to remove existing biases.