mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Contextual StereoSet: Stress-Testing Bias Alignment Robustness in Large Language Models

arXiv 2601.10460 ↗First posted 15 Jan 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.CYcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

A model that avoids stereotypes in a lab benchmark may not avoid them in deployment. We show that measured bias shifts dramatically when prompts mention different places, times, or audiences -- no adversarial prompting required. We introduce Contextual StereoSet, a benchmark that holds stereotype content fixed while systematically varying contextual framing. Testing 13 models across two protocols, we find striking patterns: anchoring to 1990 (vs. 2030) raises stereotype selection in all models tested on this contrast (p<0.05); gossip framing raises it in 5 of 6 full-grid models; out-group observer framing shifts it by up to 13 percentage points. These effects replicate in hiring, lending, and help-seeking vignettes. We propose Context Sensitivity Fingerprints (CSF): a compact profile of per-dimension dispersion and paired contrasts with bootstrap CIs and FDR correction. Two evaluation tracks support different use cases -- a 360-context diagnostic grid for deep analysis and a budgeted protocol covering 4,229 items for production screening. The implication is methodological: bias scores from fixed-condition tests may not generalize.This is not a claim about ground-truth bias rates; it is a stress test of evaluation robustness. CSF forces evaluators to ask, "Under what conditions does bias appear?" rather than "Is this model biased?" We release our benchmark, code, and results.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 10 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2026.

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References · 10

  1. 2021Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processingcited by 2,234
  2. 2020Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckListcited by 1,006
  3. 2020Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLPcited by 956
  4. 2020StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language modelscited by 924
  5. 2020CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Modelscited by 710
  6. 2021BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answeringcited by 701
  7. 2019Measurement and Fairnesscited by 308
  8. 2023In-Context Impersonation Reveals Large Language Models' Strengths and Biasescited by 155
  9. 2021Robustness Gym: Unifying the NLP Evaluation Landscapecited by 108
  10. 2021Few-shot Instruction Prompts for Pretrained Language Models to Detect Social Biasescited by 21

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  1. 2024Bias and Volatility: A Statistical Framework for Evaluating Large Language Model's Stereotypes and the Associated Generation Inconsistency
  2. 2026ImplicitBBQ: Benchmarking Implicit Bias in Large Language Models through Characteristic Based Cues
  3. 2026Redirected, Not Removed: Task-Dependent Stereotyping Reveals the Limits of LLM Alignments
  4. 2022FairDistillation: Mitigating Stereotyping in Language Models
  5. 2026The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs
  6. 2025Benchmarking Adversarial Robustness to Bias Elicitation in Large Language Models: Scalable Automated Assessment with LLM-as-a-Judge
  7. 2026QuantiBias: Benchmarking Quantization-Induced Bias in LLMs
  8. 2025VIGNETTE: Socially Grounded Bias Evaluation for Vision-Language Models