While gender and racial biases in language models have been widely studied, anti-LGBTQ biases remain underexplored, particularly beyond English. Existing benchmarks often do not capture cultural and linguistic variation and rely on gender representations. This paper introduces a multilingual German-English benchmark dataset for the evaluation of anti-LGBTQ biases in language models. It combines community-sourced stereotypes from German-speaking queer individuals with a German translation of WinoQueer. The data is used to evaluate eight language models across sizes and architectures and explore mitigation through fine-tuning on community and progressive media content. Results show that language models reproduce anti-queer stereotypes, with variation across identities and models. Differences between the translated and community-based data highlight the importance of cultural adaptation for multilingual bias evaluation. Fine-tuning reduces bias on average, but not consistently across models and identities. Warning: This text contains examples of anti-queer hateful language and stereotypes.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in the distribution of scarce resources, raising concerns about biased allocations based on characteristics like race and gender. Recent LLM audits have produced inconsistent results, however, finding evidence of both positive and negative discrimination towards women and ethnic minorities, even for the same models. We show that this disagreement can arise from differences in audit format and introduce FairFund-Bench, a benchmark that systematically varies key features of previous audit designs: the evaluation task (rating, ranking, or allocation), comparison context (single or multi-stimulus), and whether the audit is transparent or disguised. The benchmark comprises 600 requests for financial assistance created from human-authored templates (calibrated against 1.3M real GoFundMe campaigns) across three domains, four race and two gender categories, and five causal framings of need derived from welfare deservingness theory. Across 14 models, audit format changes the direction of bias: models advantage minorities when rating claimants individually but penalize some groups when ranking them side by side. Bias magnitude, though small overall, is several times greater in disguised audits than in transparent ones, where, faced with appeals differing only in claimants' names, models overwhelmingly split funds equally. Causal framing effects, by contrast, exceed demographic effects by roughly an order of magnitude and are consistent across models and audit formats, indicating that current LLMs robustly reproduce human deservingness evaluations. The benchmark scores models on four criteria (demographic bias, deservingness alignment, cross-task consistency, and cross-context consistency), is publicly available, and can be readily adapted to other substantive domains.
Sophia Lichtenberg, Albert Gatt, Judith Masthoffcs.CV
Text-to-image (T2I) models have been shown to exhibit social biases. Prior work has mainly focused on gender, skin tone, and cultural representation within restricted occupational associations, and emerging benchmarks increasingly incorporate these dimensions. However, disability remains systematically underexplored. Current evaluation practices often fail to align with sociologically grounded definitions of stereotyping, limiting principled assessment of representational harms toward people with disabilities (PWD). To address this, we introduce INCLUDE-BENCH, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating disability-related bias in T2I models. INCLUDE-BENCH comprises 119K generated images based on prompt design across multiple bias dimensions and both static and dynamic contexts. We evaluate 15 open-source and 2 closed-source models. Our key findings reveal that: (1) mobility-impaired and default disability prompts predominantly yield wheelchair depictions across all models; (2) disability-conditioned generations consistently exhibit less diversity; (3) stereotypical portrayals demonstrate stronger disability-text alignment; and (4) we introduce the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) Score, demonstrating that T2I models reflect real-world stereotypical associations.
Generative artificial intelligence has the potential to improve productivity and transform the production of creative content. However, existing research indicates that image generation models are significantly influenced by biases. This work investigates the inherent biases and language-induced biases present in text-to-image models within the context of occupation-related image generation, complementing established metrics with human preference feedback. We present a comprehensive evaluation of five current text-to-image models: Midjourney v6.1, Stable Diffusion 3 Medium, DALL-E 3, Playground v2.5, and FLUX.1-dev , focusing on gender and ethnicity bias, image quality, and prompt alignment. To facilitate this evaluation, we developed the "Battle-Arena for Fair Image Synthesis" (BAFIS), a platform designed to collect human feedback on bias in generated images. Furthermore, we created a dataset comprising 21,140 synthetic images generated using multilingual prompts, which serves as a basis for our analysis. We further place our results within a broader social context by comparing them to official statistics from the German Federal Employment Agency. Our findings reveal systematic biases in text-to-image models, with established evaluation metrics in partial correlation with subjective user ratings. Thus, our research emphasizes the need for including human preferences to develop fairer and more inclusive text-to-image models.
AI systems now shape how hundreds of millions of people learn about cultures other than their own. When someone asks one of these systems about the Middle East, they do not receive neutral facts. They receive a representation shaped by the frameworks embedded in training data, and that data is overwhelmingly Western and English-language. This paper asks whether that representation is Orientalist in Said's sense: whether it denies agency to Middle Eastern actors, treats Western frameworks as neutral while marking non-Western knowledge as particular, and explains the region through categories it did not produce. Standard fairness metrics cannot answer this, because they detect explicit prejudice rather than structural framing. This paper introduces the Middle East Cultural Sensitivity Score (MECSS), a framework that turns Said's seven Orientalist operations into measurable dimensions, and the term "Said-washing" for a specific failure: a model that disclaims generalization, then reproduces the structure it disclaimed. Across 280 conversations (1,120 exchanges), GPT-4 and Falcon3-7B-Instruct both reproduce Orientalist patterns systematically, through structural positioning rather than open stereotyping. GPT-4 scores moderately (mean MECSS 1.73); Falcon3-7B-Instruct scores higher (2.18), even though it was built in Abu Dhabi and trained with Arabic content. This is evidence against the assumption that building a model regionally makes it less Orientalist, though the models differ in size as well as origin, so geography cannot be isolated as the cause. Epistemic Center, the treatment of Western frameworks as unmarked universals, scores near the top of the scale for both models. Said-washing appears in 87.9% of GPT-4 conversations, a pattern existing metrics cannot see. Reducing this bias requires changing what models learn from, not only adding languages or relocating institutions.
Hana Samad, Trung Lam, Christoph Mügge-Durum +1cs.LG cs.AI cs.CY
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly assuming an intermediary role in housing search through the integration of listing platforms within conversational interfaces, mediating access to information, search, and recommendations within urban settings. We expand on prior work on racial steering in LLMs by conducting a behavioral audit of seven open-weight and closed-source LLMs across four U.S. cities, testing location recommendations across three iterative prompting conditions that progressively add lifestyle preference context and reflect fair housing paired-testing methodologies. We find that steering is an emergent behavior of the model's interpretive license rather than primarily a static property. Steering results from the interaction of a user's identity, preference articulation, and the spatial logic that a model has internalized about learned representations of place, preference, and opportunity in a given city, and how different types of users relate to it. While steering was present, it was not uniform in direction or magnitude across evaluated conditions. Preference-conditioned testing often increased or reconfigured the number of models that exhibited steering behaviors relative to baseline conditions, suggesting that LLMs may interpret what the same housing preference means differently depending on the racial identity of the user. Our findings also demonstrate that the city is not a neutral testing unit for LLM evaluation in place-based sectors, and results from one local market cannot be assumed to generalize to another. Local and domain expertise will be required in the housing sector to ensure that legal and institutional commitments to fair housing are not undermined while adopting AI tools that mediate spatial access.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used, including in political applications, but their political fairness has been little studied. We assess it using perplexity, posing that a fair model should give equal probability to all political groups. However, we find, across ten LLMs and three datasets covering 37 languages, that LLMs are more perplexed by the texts of far right and nationalist parties than of social-democratic parties. We find this to be consistent with previous work on translation fairness, to the point that perplexity correlates with downstream translation metrics. Our method is applicable to both base LLMs as well as their instruction-tuned counterpart, and we find that both are highly correlated, suggesting that the political fairness of LLMs stems from their pretraining, and is hardly affected by instruction-tuning.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly popular in educational settings, they raise important questions about the ethical implications of their use. Publicly available online chatbots are quickly improving in capability and accuracy leading to more widespread use, including among students looking for help with their homework. This makes it crucial to consider whether these models are aligned with educational standards. Because curriculum standards in the United States are set at the state level, they differ significantly in required content, emphasis, and narrative focus. In this work, we develop an LLM-based pipeline to identify variations in U.S. History curricula across states and evaluate the extent to which different LLMs reflect these state-specific curricular differences. In addition, we conduct controlled experiments that vary user personas by stating user attributes such as geographic location, grade level, gender and race to evaluate the sensitivity of LLM responses to user characteristics. We find that while models are able to adjust their presentation of historical topics, these shifts may come from the perceived political leanings of states and do not necessarily reflect actual curriculum content. Additionally, models successfully adapt to a student's grade level while showing minimal sensitivity to race or gender, suggesting they are capable of useful adaptation to student personas with limited demographic bias. Together, these findings highlight potential risks that open access to LLM chatbots may cause to student learning outcomes stemming from misalignment with state curriculum standards and highlight the need for more robust alignment techniques.