Bias & fairness

OpenAI’s proposal to hand the U.S. government a 5 percent equity stake has made a theoretical debate over the relationship between private corporations and the government into an immediately relevant ...

Further action against genetic discrimination Australia has taken a decisive step in protecting its citizens from the harms of ‘genetic discrimination’. A new amendment to the Disability Discrimination Act will make it illegal for life insurers to charge higher rates or refuse cover based on a person’s genetic test results. 1 The reform is the result of a decade of advocacy led by researchers at Monash University. 2 The Australian Human Rights Commission welcomed the new legisl

The deployment of face detection models in real-world applications raises important fairness concerns, as these systems may showcase performance disparities across demographic groups. A key obstacle to studying and mitigating such biases is the lack of face detection datasets with sensitive feature annotations. To address this gap, we introduce WIDER-FAIR, a new dataset built on the widely used WIDER-FACE benchmark, manually annotated with the perceived ethnicity and sex of each face. The datase

As large language models take on morally consequential roles in healthcare, legal, and hiring contexts, we need to examine whether their ethical behaviors are genuine or superficial. We show that current fairness evaluations substantially overestimate moral safety. Models appear fair when demographic identity is stated as an explicit label, yet become measurably less fair when the same identity must be inferred. We term this failure performative compliance, where a model is fair when the present

Joint OFDM-RIS optimization for 6G is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem covering sum-rate maximization, energy efficiency, max-min fairness, and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR)-constrained objectives. Seventy-eight joint OFDM-RIS optimization works published between 2021 and 2026 are surveyed. No standardized benchmark exists, and cross-paper comparisons remain infeasible. This survey classifies these works into four paradigms: (I) model-based convex relaxation, (II) heuri

Optimizing nonlinear preferences in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is essential for capturing complex trade-offs like risk aversion or fairness. However, such non-linearity has historically bifurcated nonlinear MORL objectives into two distinct paradigms: Scalarized Expected Return (SER) and Expected Scalarized Return (ESR). While SER requires global-level optimization and ESR requires non-Markovian policies, leading to fragmented optimization strategies, we bridge this divide thr

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are critically hampered by hallucination, generating content inconsistent with the provided image. In this paper, we identify an internal signature of hallucination: progressive degradation of text-to-image cross-attention during generation, leading to specific failure patterns like unfocused or biased attention. Existing mitigation strategies are largely outcome-driven and do not explicitly target this failure mode. To address this problem, we propose AD

Warning: This paper contains several toxic and offensive statements. While reasoning generally improves fairness in recent large language models (LLMs), failures persist. In this work, we identify a failure mode, deductive stereotyping, in which models apply population-level statistical regularities to individual cases, producing logically coherent yet socially biased inferences. We provide a statistical interpretation of this phenomenon. To steer models toward fairness-aware reasoning, we propo

Improving the reliability of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a central challenge in structured reasoning tasks such as Text-to-SQL. Common test-time inference strategies, including Best-of-N sampling and Majority Voting, rely on heuristic signals such as execution success or output frequency, which provide limited semantic discrimination across candidate outputs. In this work, we study Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) as learned semantic scoring functions for test-time verification

External evaluations are becoming increasingly central to the governance of AI systems. In practice, however, independent auditors often have limited access to deployed models and must rely on query-based interactions. Most existing fairness evaluation methods assume static datasets and fixed-sample statistical tests, making them poorly suited to real-world auditing scenarios in which evidence must be collected sequentially under query constraints. In this work, we formulate fairness auditing as

Structured tabular data dominates clinical medicine, yet existing benchmarks fail to reflect real-world properties like complex survey sampling, demographic oversampling, and subgroup fairness. We introduce the NHANES Accelerometry Cardiometabolic Benchmark, derived from NHANES 2003-2006, comprising 1,381 adults with hip-worn accelerometry, fasting laboratory biomarkers, dietary intake, and anthropometrics. We evaluate three tabular learning methods -- ridge regression, XGBoost, and the foundati

The requests inject claims of political bias into a process that will determine if Disney keeps its lucrative licenses.

This paper presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of 62 studies that developed speech- and language-based AI for severe mental illnesses (SMI) (i.e., characterized by substantial communication problems affecting speech production and language). We employed a random-effects meta-analysis using Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML). We evaluated these studies using our proposed rigorous 16-item quality assessment framework, grouped into three domains: Study Design, Fairness and Explainabili

Adaptive Financial Transformer (AFT) is proposed for stock return prediction under non-stationary financial markets. The model incorporates a Market Regime Encoder, an Adaptive Gate Network, and an Adaptive Financial Context module to dynamically bias self-attention based on semantic relationships between financial indicators. Unlike conventional Transformer architectures that treat all input features uniformly, the proposed approach groups 95 engineered financial features into 11 semantic categ

We identify intervention bias as a previously unquantified failure mode of zero-shot large-language-model (LLM) educational advisory agents: without task-specific training, they recommend action when a hindsight-optimal oracle policy mandates inaction. In a six-arm ablation on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (N=800 students, four temporal cutoffs), at day 56 -- when the oracle designates 70.1% of students as needing no intervention -- zero-shot GPT-4o recommends action for 73%, a

The unfairness of recommender systems has become a topic of concern due to its significant social and ethical implications. Although existing works have shown the effectiveness of attacks on the performance of recommender systems (e.g., promotion and demotion attack), the study of fairness attacks on recommender systems remains largely under-explored. To this end, we propose a novel structure-aware reinforcement learning-based fairness attack method designed to exacerbate the unfairness of targe

Large Language Models (LLMs) often face ethical tradeoffs in which several responses may be defensible but express different priorities, such as fairness, honesty, courage, or restraint. We introduce VirtueMap, a framework for describing these patterns through an Aristotelian virtue-ethics lens. Instead of asking for a single correct answer, VirtueMap asks humans or LLMs to rank all five responses to each of seven general, non-lethal, non-political, and non-religious ethical dilemmas. To define

Fayyazi et al. (2025) recently proposed FACTER, a model-agnostic framework designed to jointly enforce fairness and statistical coverage in LLM-based recommendation through conformal thresholding and iterative prompt repair. In this work, we conduct a reproducibility study of the FACTER framework across diverse architectures and dataset sparsity levels, evaluating both the original open-ended generation task and a constrained re-ranking extension. Under the strict reproduction, we observe a dive

Across social and online platforms, people are increasingly exposed to AI-generated images. As a consequence, the task of distinguishing AI-generated from authentic images is becoming a central challenge for information ecosystems. While humans perform better than chance, accuracy falls short of many operational needs. Initial evidence shows that visually oriented training can improve deepfake detection but does not improve participants' ability to identify real images as real. Here, we investig

Predicting human item difficulty is central to educational assessment, where reliable estimates support fairness and effective test construction. Existing methods often depend on costly human calibration or item-level textual representations, providing limited evidence about the cognitive processes that make items difficult. We argue that difficulty should be viewed not only as a property of item text, but also as an observable consequence of the problem-solving burden an item induces. Large Rea

Last-iterate convergence and generalization guarantees in first-order convex learning hinge on the monotonicity of the update operator. While linear averaging preserves the monotonicity of gradient updates, this property is often violated when gradients are aggregated non-affinely, as in modern pipelines enforcing constraints like adaptivity, privacy, robustness or fairness. Whether it is possible to design non-affine aggregation rules that maintain monotonicity has remained an open question. We

Post-hoc controllability of fair machine learning models, the ability to control the trade-off between fairness and accuracy after training, is valuable for practical deployment. Existing post-processing methods provide such post-hoc controllability but often suffer from significant accuracy degradation, whereas in-processing methods achieve efficient trade-offs but require computationally expensive retraining for each change in trade-off ratio. To achieve both post-hoc controllability and effic

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Modern AI systems are increasingly deployed under non-stationary computational, demographic, and operational conditions in which static resource allocation strategies degrade both predictive performance and human-centric properties such as fairness and explainability. This paper presents AURORA-AI, an Adaptive Utility-driven Resource Orchestration framework for Resilient AI that unifies Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman feedback control, Lyapunov-based stability monitoring, and a fairness-aware composite

Warm-started diffusion samplers accelerate iterative inference, but it is rarely clear which part of the pipeline carries the gain. We study \textbf{retrieval-warmed energy-based reasoning (RW-EBR)} -- an IRED energy-based diffusion model \cite{du2024ired} augmented with a Modern Hopfield trajectory memory -- and contribute a \textbf{five-arm ablation methodology} (oracle, best-constant, per-query-random, shuffled, aligned) that separates three confounded effects: class-prior bias shift, stochas

Scoring functions are used to represent the relevance of individual documents. In modern information retrieval or recommendation systems, they are often learned from data and play a pivotal role in ranking sets of documents or items in a way that maximizes utility to a query or user. With the recent interest in algorithmic fairness, the success of scoring has naturally led to methods that learn scores that simultaneously trade off fairness and utility. In this work, we show that in stark contras

Training-time data poisoning during fine-tuning poses a significant threat to large language models (LLMs) deployed for abstractive text summarization, where small task-specific datasets exert disproportionate influence on model behavior. In this setting, adversaries manipulate fine-tuning data to induce persistent summarization failures, such as biased or harmful summaries, while preserving standard evaluation metrics. We present a unified post-hoc defense framework for detecting and remediatin

Modern machine learning systems have outgrown their origins as isolated predictive constructs, evolving into complex socio-technical architectures that actively mediate human opportunity. As algorithms increasingly determine access to economic and social opportunities, it has become widely recognized that these systems are deeply embedded with the structural inequalities and prejudices of their environments. The field of algorithmic fairness emerged in response to the growing recognition that mo

A new report shows how AI systems are already failing LGBTQ+ users. The problem is: it may also the best way to fix moderation issues that traditional systems never managed to address.

Alibaba Group is planning to sell its gaming unit Lingxi Games, according to people familiar with the matter. Alibaba has approached at least five potential buyers, including Chinese game developers 37 Interactive Entertainment, China Ruyi, Century Huatong and Giant Network, as well as two private equity firms, the sources said. The business is being marketed […]

Sparse voxel representation has emerged as a scalable foundation for image-to-3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) generation, yet current methods struggle to preserve high-frequency visual details of input images due to two structural bottlenecks. First, they adopt discriminative 2D features optimized for semantic abstraction to construct sparse voxel latents, which suppress reconstructive cues and induce a representation bottleneck. Second, in the generation stage, standard diffusion transformers lack

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in clinical settings increasingly requires multilingual retrieval against predominantly English evidence corpora. Multilingual medical retrieval demands three capabilities: cross-lingual alignment, concept discrimination, and evidence retrieval. However, existing benchmarks evaluate these only in isolation, leaving the interaction between biomedical expertise and multilingual coverage unmeasured. We introduce MMed-Bench-IR, a benchmark designed to disentangle

Recommender systems often induce filter bubbles and semantic homogenization by monolithically optimizing for immediate user engagement. Standard single-objective models, including traditional Deep Q-Networks, are ill-equipped to navigate the trade-offs between platform retention and critical societal values like information diversity and provider fairness. To address these limitations, we introduce a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that formalizes recommendation as a semantic mu

AI safety research has focused predominantly on epistemic and physical harms (e.g., misinformation, bias, system reliability) while the risks that arise from AI systems' engagement with human emotional life have remained fragmented and undertheorised. We propose affective safety as a unified class of AI safety concerns grounded in the fact that humans are affective beings. We develop a taxonomy of affective harms and identify recurring harm types: (1) affective self-alienation, (2) fairness and

Predictive modelling of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) remains fragmented across analytical theories, finite-geometry solvers and disconnected simulation workflows. These disparate approaches must be unified into an executable framework to advance quantitative TENG research.Here we introduce a charge-defined modelling framework and implement it as TENG-CLAW, a physics-governed platform for traceable TENG simulation. The framework establishes a self-consistent electrostatic hierarchy in whi

While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have revolutionized high-fidelity video generation, their reliance on 3D full attention creates a quadratic computational bottleneck. Existing sparse methods face a dilemma: dynamic pruning suffers from prohibitive runtime overhead and memory fragmentation, while static heuristics fail to capture fine-grained dependencies. In this work, we propose ScalingAttention, a training-free framework grounded in a key inductive bias: while individual activations are inp

As machine learning models grow more influential and opaque, algorithmic fairness and explainability are critical for ensuring accountability. However, we demonstrate that these auditing mechanisms are themselves vulnerable to subtle manipulation, camouflaging the influence of protected features. While prior work on data-agnostic attacks has exposed this vulnerability, they leave behind detectable artifacts that compromise their stealth. We introduce Targeted Identity Re-Association (TIRA) attac

AI is increasingly being used collaboratively with people to make decisions in high-stakes domains, but this new paradigm is still not well-understood in many respects -- particularly regarding how AI that replicates human social biases influences people's decision making processes and how that can influence outcomes. In this study, we analyzed the time people spend viewing candidate resumes from an experiment investigating biased AI resume screening to evaluate decision-making fairness and cogn

As academic submissions grow, the traditional peer review process struggles to keep up, raising concerns about quality and fairness. A trend of using large language models (LLMs) for assistance has emerged. In this work, we take a critical step toward improving the quality of LLM-generated reviews. We propose the PeerCheck framework, which investigates LLM-human review differences (RQ1) and explores methods to improve LLM-generated review quality (RQ2). We first analyzed the human-written review

Machine learning models have been shown to exhibit discriminatory outcomes or degraded performance for individuals at the intersection of multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. This stems in part from two interrelated challenges: the lack of principled measures for quantifying bias (potentially intersectional), and insufficient representation of intersectional subgroups in training data. We extend a recent bias mitigation framework to incorporate coverage constraints that enforc