No Free Lunch in Language Model Bias Mitigation? Targeted Bias Reduction Can Exacerbate Unmitigated LLM Biases
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866909920212811776 |
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| author | Chand, Shireen Baca, Faith Ferrara, Emilio |
| author_facet | Chand, Shireen Baca, Faith Ferrara, Emilio |
| contents | Large Language Models (LLMs) inherit societal biases from their training data, potentially leading to harmful or unfair outputs. While various techniques aim to mitigate these biases, their effects are often evaluated only along the dimension of the bias being targeted. This work investigates the cross-category consequences of targeted bias mitigation. We study four bias mitigation techniques applied across ten models from seven model families, and we explore racial, religious, profession- and gender-related biases. We measure the impact of debiasing on model coherence and stereotypical preference using the StereoSet benchmark. Our results consistently show that while targeted mitigation can sometimes reduce bias in the intended dimension, it frequently leads to unintended and often negative consequences in others, such as increasing model bias and decreasing general coherence. These findings underscore the critical need for robust, multi-dimensional evaluation tools when examining and developing bias mitigation strategies to avoid inadvertently shifting or worsening bias along untargeted axes. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18635 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | No Free Lunch in Language Model Bias Mitigation? Targeted Bias Reduction Can Exacerbate Unmitigated LLM Biases Chand, Shireen Baca, Faith Ferrara, Emilio Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society Large Language Models (LLMs) inherit societal biases from their training data, potentially leading to harmful or unfair outputs. While various techniques aim to mitigate these biases, their effects are often evaluated only along the dimension of the bias being targeted. This work investigates the cross-category consequences of targeted bias mitigation. We study four bias mitigation techniques applied across ten models from seven model families, and we explore racial, religious, profession- and gender-related biases. We measure the impact of debiasing on model coherence and stereotypical preference using the StereoSet benchmark. Our results consistently show that while targeted mitigation can sometimes reduce bias in the intended dimension, it frequently leads to unintended and often negative consequences in others, such as increasing model bias and decreasing general coherence. These findings underscore the critical need for robust, multi-dimensional evaluation tools when examining and developing bias mitigation strategies to avoid inadvertently shifting or worsening bias along untargeted axes. |
| title | No Free Lunch in Language Model Bias Mitigation? Targeted Bias Reduction Can Exacerbate Unmitigated LLM Biases |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18635 |