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Main Authors: Haller, Patrick, Vamvas, Jannis, Sennrich, Rico, Jäger, Lena A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22232
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author Haller, Patrick
Vamvas, Jannis
Sennrich, Rico
Jäger, Lena A.
author_facet Haller, Patrick
Vamvas, Jannis
Sennrich, Rico
Jäger, Lena A.
contents A growing body of work has been querying LLMs with political questions to evaluate their potential biases. However, this probing method has limited stability, making comparisons between models unreliable. In this paper, we argue that LLMs need more context. We propose a new probing task, Questionnaire Modeling (QM), that uses human survey data as in-context examples. We show that QM improves the stability of question-based bias evaluation, and demonstrate that it may be used to compare instruction-tuned models to their base versions. Experiments with LLMs of various sizes indicate that instruction tuning can indeed change the direction of bias. Furthermore, we observe a trend that larger models are able to leverage in-context examples more effectively, and generally exhibit smaller bias scores in QM. Data and code are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22232
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging In-Context Learning for Political Bias Testing of LLMs
Haller, Patrick
Vamvas, Jannis
Sennrich, Rico
Jäger, Lena A.
Computation and Language
A growing body of work has been querying LLMs with political questions to evaluate their potential biases. However, this probing method has limited stability, making comparisons between models unreliable. In this paper, we argue that LLMs need more context. We propose a new probing task, Questionnaire Modeling (QM), that uses human survey data as in-context examples. We show that QM improves the stability of question-based bias evaluation, and demonstrate that it may be used to compare instruction-tuned models to their base versions. Experiments with LLMs of various sizes indicate that instruction tuning can indeed change the direction of bias. Furthermore, we observe a trend that larger models are able to leverage in-context examples more effectively, and generally exhibit smaller bias scores in QM. Data and code are publicly available.
title Leveraging In-Context Learning for Political Bias Testing of LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22232