Quantifying and Mitigating Selection Bias in LLMs: A Transferable LoRA Fine-Tuning and Efficient Majority Voting Approach

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Main Authors: Guda, Blessed, Francis, Lawrence, Ashungafac, Gabrial Zencha, Joe-Wong, Carlee, Busogi, Moise
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Guda, Blessed
Francis, Lawrence
Ashungafac, Gabrial Zencha
Joe-Wong, Carlee
Busogi, Moise
author_facet Guda, Blessed
Francis, Lawrence
Ashungafac, Gabrial Zencha
Joe-Wong, Carlee
Busogi, Moise
contents Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) answering is a widely used method for evaluating the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, LLMs often exhibit selection bias in MCQ tasks, where their choices are influenced by factors like answer position or option symbols rather than the content. This bias undermines the reliability of MCQ as an evaluation framework. Most existing selection bias metrics require answer labels and measure divergences between prediction and answer distributions, but do not fully capture the consistency of a model's predictions across different orderings of answer choices. Existing selection bias mitigation strategies have notable limitations: majority voting, though effective, is computationally prohibitive; calibration-based methods require validation sets and often fail to generalize across datasets. To address these gaps, we propose three key contributions: (1) a new unsupervised label-free Permutation Bias Metric (PBM) that directly quantifies inconsistencies in model predictions across answer permutations, providing a more precise measure of selection bias, (2) an efficient majority voting approach called Batch Question-Context KV caching (BaQCKV), to significantly reduce computational costs while preserving bias mitigation effectiveness, and (3) an unsupervised Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA-1) fine-tuning strategy based on our proposed metric and the BaQCKV that mitigates selection bias, providing a computationally efficient alternative that maintains model generalizability. Experiments across multiple MCQ benchmarks demonstrate that our approaches reduce bias, increasing consistency in accuracy while minimizing computational costs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21709
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying and Mitigating Selection Bias in LLMs: A Transferable LoRA Fine-Tuning and Efficient Majority Voting Approach
Guda, Blessed
Francis, Lawrence
Ashungafac, Gabrial Zencha
Joe-Wong, Carlee
Busogi, Moise
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) answering is a widely used method for evaluating the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, LLMs often exhibit selection bias in MCQ tasks, where their choices are influenced by factors like answer position or option symbols rather than the content. This bias undermines the reliability of MCQ as an evaluation framework. Most existing selection bias metrics require answer labels and measure divergences between prediction and answer distributions, but do not fully capture the consistency of a model's predictions across different orderings of answer choices. Existing selection bias mitigation strategies have notable limitations: majority voting, though effective, is computationally prohibitive; calibration-based methods require validation sets and often fail to generalize across datasets. To address these gaps, we propose three key contributions: (1) a new unsupervised label-free Permutation Bias Metric (PBM) that directly quantifies inconsistencies in model predictions across answer permutations, providing a more precise measure of selection bias, (2) an efficient majority voting approach called Batch Question-Context KV caching (BaQCKV), to significantly reduce computational costs while preserving bias mitigation effectiveness, and (3) an unsupervised Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA-1) fine-tuning strategy based on our proposed metric and the BaQCKV that mitigates selection bias, providing a computationally efficient alternative that maintains model generalizability. Experiments across multiple MCQ benchmarks demonstrate that our approaches reduce bias, increasing consistency in accuracy while minimizing computational costs.
title Quantifying and Mitigating Selection Bias in LLMs: A Transferable LoRA Fine-Tuning and Efficient Majority Voting Approach
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21709