# In-Contextual Gender Bias Suppression for Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07251 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07251/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (2022)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08193/) (2021)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05783/) (2021)
- [Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00453/) (2021)
- [Towards Understanding and Mitigating Social Biases in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13219/) (2021)
- [Lipstick on a Pig: Debiasing Methods Cover up Systematic Gender Biases in Word Embeddings But do not Remove Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03862/) (2019)
- [Prompting GPT-3 To Be Reliable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09150/) (2022)
- [Negated and Misprimed Probes for Pretrained Language Models: Birds Can Talk, But Cannot Fly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03343/) (2019)
- [Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06032/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03310/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Languages with Rich Morphology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04571/) (2019)
- [The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07459/) (2023)
- [Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12084/) (2021)
- [Debiasing Pre-trained Contextualised Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09523/) (2021)
- [It's All in the Name: Mitigating Gender Bias with Name-Based Counterfactual Data Substitution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00871/) (2019)
- [Sustainable Modular Debiasing of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03646/) (2021)
- [Toward Gender-Inclusive Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13913/) (2019)
- [Gender-preserving Debiasing for Pre-trained Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00742/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Large Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15585/) (2024)
- [SafeWatch: An Efficient Safety-Policy Following Video Guardrail Model with Transparent Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06878/) (2024)
- [Both Direct and Indirect Evidence Contribute to Dative Alternation Preferences in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20850/) (2025)
- [Causal-Guided Active Learning for Debiasing Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12942/) (2024)
- [Hire Me or Not? Examining Language Model's Behavior with Occupation Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06687/) (2024)
- [Different Bias Under Different Criteria: Assessing Bias in LLMs with a Fact-Based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17338/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09826/) (2024)
- [BiasFreeBench: a Benchmark for Mitigating Bias in Large Language Model Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00232/) (2025)
- [Neuron-Level Interventions for Gendered and Gender-Neutral Generation in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30717/) (2026)
- [Faithful-Patchscopes: Understanding and Mitigating Model Bias in Hidden Representations Explanation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00300/) (2026)
- [DeFrame: Debiasing Large Language Models Against Framing Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04306/) (2026)
- [Auto-Search and Refinement: An Automated Framework for Gender Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11559/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite their impressive performance in a wide range of NLP tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reported to encode worrying-levels of gender biases. Prior work has proposed debiasing methods that require human labelled examples, data augmentation and fine-tuning of LLMs, which are computationally costly. Moreover, one might not even have access to the model parameters for performing debiasing such as in the case of closed LLMs such as GPT-4. To address this challenge, we propose bias suppression that prevents biased generations of LLMs by simply providing textual preambles constructed from manually designed templates and real-world statistics, without accessing to model parameters. We show that, using CrowsPairs dataset, our textual preambles covering counterfactual statements can suppress gender biases in English LLMs such as LLaMA2. Moreover, we find that gender-neutral descriptions of gender-biased objects can also suppress their gender biases. Moreover, we show that bias suppression has acceptable adverse effect on downstream task performance with HellaSwag and COPA.