Epistemic Bias Injection: Biasing LLMs via Selective Context Retrieval
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866910073090998272 |
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| author | Wu, Hao Saxena, Prateek |
| author_facet | Wu, Hao Saxena, Prateek |
| contents | When answering user queries, LLMs often retrieve knowledge from external sources stored in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) databases. These are often populated from unvetted sources, e.g. the open web, and can contain maliciously crafted data. This paper studies attacks that can manipulate the context retrieved by LLMs from such RAG databases. Prior work on such context manipulation primarily injects false or toxic content, which can often be detected by fact-checking or linguistic analysis. We reveal a more subtle threat, Epistemic Bias Injection (EBI), in which adversaries inject factually correct yet epistemically biased passages that systematically emphasize one side of a multi-viewpoint issue. Although linguistically coherent and truthful, such adversarial passages effectively crowd out alternative viewpoints and steer model outputs toward an attacker-chosen stance.
As a core contribution, we propose a novel characterization of the problem: We give a geometric metric that quantifies epistemic bias. This metric can be computed directly on embeddings of text passages retrieved by the LLM. Leveraging this metric, we construct EBI attacks and develop a lightweight prototype defense called BiasDef for them. We evaluate them both on a comprehensive benchmark constructed from public question answering datasets.Our results show that: (1) the proposed attack induces significant perspective shifts, effectively evading existing retrieval-based sanitization defenses, and (2) BiasDef substantially reduces adversarial retrieval and bias in LLM's answers. Overall, this demonstrates the new threat as well as the ease of employing epistemic bias metrics for filtering in RAG-enabled LLMs. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_00804 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Epistemic Bias Injection: Biasing LLMs via Selective Context Retrieval Wu, Hao Saxena, Prateek Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence Databases When answering user queries, LLMs often retrieve knowledge from external sources stored in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) databases. These are often populated from unvetted sources, e.g. the open web, and can contain maliciously crafted data. This paper studies attacks that can manipulate the context retrieved by LLMs from such RAG databases. Prior work on such context manipulation primarily injects false or toxic content, which can often be detected by fact-checking or linguistic analysis. We reveal a more subtle threat, Epistemic Bias Injection (EBI), in which adversaries inject factually correct yet epistemically biased passages that systematically emphasize one side of a multi-viewpoint issue. Although linguistically coherent and truthful, such adversarial passages effectively crowd out alternative viewpoints and steer model outputs toward an attacker-chosen stance. As a core contribution, we propose a novel characterization of the problem: We give a geometric metric that quantifies epistemic bias. This metric can be computed directly on embeddings of text passages retrieved by the LLM. Leveraging this metric, we construct EBI attacks and develop a lightweight prototype defense called BiasDef for them. We evaluate them both on a comprehensive benchmark constructed from public question answering datasets.Our results show that: (1) the proposed attack induces significant perspective shifts, effectively evading existing retrieval-based sanitization defenses, and (2) BiasDef substantially reduces adversarial retrieval and bias in LLM's answers. Overall, this demonstrates the new threat as well as the ease of employing epistemic bias metrics for filtering in RAG-enabled LLMs. |
| title | Epistemic Bias Injection: Biasing LLMs via Selective Context Retrieval |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Artificial Intelligence Databases |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00804 |