Understanding biases and stereotypes encoded in the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. However, biased behavior is often subtle and non-trivial to isolate, even when deliberately elicited, making systematic analysis and debiasing particularly challenging. To address this, we introduce a simple, cost-effective, and generalizable framework BiasGym for reliably injecting, analyzing, and mitigating conceptual associations of biases within LLMs. BiasGym consists of two modules: Inject, which injects specific biases into the model via token-based fine-tuning while keeping the model frozen, followed by two debiasing methods that leverage these injected signals to identify and reliably suppress (Scope) or Steer the components responsible for biased behavior. Our framework enables consistent bias elicitation for better localization of bias conceptual association in the model space, supports targeted debiasing without degrading performance on downstream tasks, and generalizes to biases unseen during fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in reducing real-world stereotypes (e.g., people from Italy being ‘reckless drivers’), showing its utility for both safety interventions and interpretability research.

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly used to answer subjective, information-seeking questions, where users are sensitive to how responses are communicated, not just whether the answers are correct. Existing LLM evaluations for subjective cultural queries largely focus on factual correctness, ignoring how the response is framed. To this end, we introduce FRANZ, an automated FRAmework for respoNse characteriZation to conduct a communicative audit of LLM responses along four dimensions: cultural positioning, use of generalizing language, anthropomorphic cues, and adherence to conversational maxims. To enable this evaluation, we contribute SQUARE - a corpus of 376k subjective questions sourced from 57 subreddits and mapped to 7 countries and 19 question categories. We demonstrate FRANZ’s applicability by scoring responses from three open-weight LLMs. We observe that LLMs show statistically significant differences in the frequency with which they employ each response characteristic. Unlike single-dimensional audits, FRANZ reveals that insider positioning and anthropomorphism are positively coupled, with the degree of coupling varying by country, providing a diagnostic lens for identifying framing divergences.

Names are deeply tied to human identity - they can serve as markers of individuality, cultural heritage, and personal history. When interacting with LLMs, user names can enter chatbot conversations through direct user input (requested by chatbots), as part of task contexts such as CV reviews, or as built-in memory features that store user information for personalisation. In this work, we study name-based cultural bias by analyzing the adaptations that LLMs make when names are mentioned in the prompt. Our analyses demonstrate that LLMs exhibit significant cultural identity assumptions across multiple cultures based on users’ presumed backgrounds based on their names. We also show how using names as an indicator of identity can lead to misattribution and flattening of cultural identities. Our work has implications for designing more nuanced personalisation systems that avoid reinforcing stereotypes while maintaining meaningful customisation.

Large-scale deployment of large language models (LLMs) in various applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, requires LLMs to be culturally sensitive to the user to ensure inclusivity. Culture has been widely studied in psychology and anthropology, and there has been a recent surge in research on making LLMs more culturally inclusive, going beyond multilinguality and building on findings from psychology and anthropology. In this article, we survey efforts towards incorporating cultural awareness into text-based and multimodal LLMs. We start by defining cultural awareness in LLMs, taking definitions of culture from the anthropology and psychology literature as a point of departure. We then examine methodologies adopted for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion in downstream tasks, and methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness in LLMs. Further, we discuss the ethical implications of cultural alignment, the role of human–computer interaction in driving cultural inclusion in LLMs, and the role of cultural alignment in driving social science research. We finally provide pointers to future research based on our findings about gaps in the literature.1

Recent advances in pretrained multilingual models such as Multilingual T5 (mT5) have facilitated cross-lingual transfer by learning shared representations across languages. Leveraging pretrained multilingual models for scaling morphology analyzers to low-resource languages is a unique opportunity that has been under-explored so far. We investigate this line of research in the context of Indian languages, focusing on two important morphological sub-tasks: root word extraction and tagging morphosyntactic descriptions (MSD), viz., gender, number, and person (GNP). We experiment with six Indian languages from two language families (Dravidian and Indo-Aryan) to train a multilingual morphology analyzers for the first time for Indian languages. We demonstrate the usability of multilingual models for few-shot cross-lingual transfer through an average 7% increase in GNP tagging in a cross-lingual setting as compared to a monolingual setting through controlled experiments. We provide an overview of the state of the datasets available related to our tasks and point-out a few modeling limitations due to datasets. Lastly, we analyze the cross-lingual transfer of morphological tags for verbs and nouns, which provides a proxy for the quality of representations of word markings learned by the model.