# More Bias, Less Bias: BiasPrompting for Enhanced Multiple-Choice Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20086 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20086/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19118/) (2023)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02406/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [Faithful Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13379/) (2023)
- [Examining Inter-Consistency of Large Language Models Collaboration: An In-depth Analysis via Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11595/) (2023)
- [Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13007/) (2023)
- [Thread of Thought Unraveling Chaotic Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08734/) (2023)
- [Improving In-Context Few-Shot Learning via Self-Supervised Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01703/) (2022)
- [Tab-CoT: Zero-shot Tabular Chain of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17812/) (2023)
- [Bias in Language Models: Beyond Trick Tests and Toward RUTEd Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12649/) (2024)
- [Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05615/) (2024)
- [FASTopic: Pretrained Transformer is a Fast, Adaptive, Stable, and Transferable Topic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17978/) (2024)
- [LLMs Are Biased Towards Output Formats! Systematically Evaluating and Mitigating Output Format Bias of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08656/) (2024)
- [Improving Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization via Employing Optimal Transport Distance for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03473/) (2021)
- [Improving Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: Supervised Angular Margin-based Contrastive Learning for Enhanced Fusion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02227/) (2023)
- [Motion-aware Contrastive Learning for Temporal Panoptic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07160/) (2024)
- [Exploring Demonstration Ensembling for In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08780/) (2023)
- [MAMA: Meta-optimized Angular Margin Contrastive Framework for Video-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03788/) (2024)
- [ToXCL: A Unified Framework for Toxic Speech Detection and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16685/) (2024)
- [Curriculum Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18126/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A, B, C, or Stable? Accuracy and Order Sensitivity Diverge in LLM Multiple-Choice Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11947/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), their performance on multiple-choice question (MCQ) tasks has improved significantly. However, existing approaches face key limitations: answer choices are typically presented to LLMs without contextual grounding or explanation. This absence of context can lead to incomplete exploration of all possible answers, ultimately degrading the models' reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce BiasPrompting, a novel inference framework that guides LLMs to generate and critically evaluate reasoning across all plausible answer options before reaching a final prediction. It consists of two components: first, a reasoning generation stage, where the model is prompted to produce supportive reasonings for each answer option, and then, a reasoning-guided agreement stage, where the generated reasonings are synthesized to select the most plausible answer. Through comprehensive evaluations, BiasPrompting demonstrates significant improvements in five widely used multiple-choice question answering benchmarks. Our experiments showcase that BiasPrompting enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and provides a strong foundation for tackling complex and challenging questions, particularly in settings where existing methods underperform.