Papers for

ai ethics officers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Semantic leakage causes subtle gender bias in language models

Guilt by Association: Semantic Leakage Drives Associative Gender Bias

Abstract: Semantic leakage occurs when a concept in the prompt steers model generation about an entity, even though the concept is irrelevant to it (e.g., a person who likes yellow is said to work as a school bus driver). It has mostly been studied in settings where the concept is directly attributed to the entity the model is asked about. This leaves open whether leakage is a flawed heuristic, where the model builds a profile of that entity, or a much broader associative tendency, e.g., working across seemingly unrelated entities. We argue for the latter: even after removing the attribution of the concept to the specific entity, leakage persists. Next, we extend this idea to gender bias. While work on gender bias in LMs typically looks at cases where the stereotyped concept is attributed to an entity, our findings suggest that a concept may steer outputs with its mere presence in the scene. We show this using gendered concepts under two conditions: when the subject engages with the concept, and when the concept just sits in the scene. We find that both shift model generation toward the stereotype to a similar extent. Together, our results suggest that semantic leakage drives a form of bias that is overlooked by current evaluations.

Tue 20 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Sometimes language models make guesses based on ideas that are nearby but not actually related. The authors studied how words connected to gender stereotypes affect what the model says, even if those words aren’t directly about the person being discussed. They found that just having a gendered word nearby can steer the model to say things that match stereotypes. This effect is called semantic leakage and shows a new way bias can sneak into AI language tools.
Open → 2610.28944v1

Large language models face hidden compliance risks in AI laws

EADC: Evaluation of Advanced and Deep-level Compliance in Large Language Models

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used in various industries. However, ensuring their compliance with complex laws and regulatory frameworks remains a great challenge. Existing evaluation paradigms mainly rely on static benchmarks that suffer from three severe limitations: First, the compliance rules being used do not comply with the requirements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) laws and regulations; Second, they only handle apparent, explicit compliance risks, leaving implicit and covert compliance risks undetected; Third, they fail to track the systematic propagation of risks along logical dependency chains or evaluate compliance within nuanced, context-based real-world scenarios. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce EADC, a novel advanced evaluation benchmark of LLMs based on an AI compliance knowledge graph and AI compliance legal experts. By mapping abstract legal rules into structured logical multi-relational graphs, our framework enables automated, evolving agents to distill and synthesize highly sophisticated adversarial scenarios. This compliance benchmark is reviewed and corrected by human AI legal experts throughout the whole process. The resulting dataset (4,435+ QA pairs) provides an extensive, multi-dimensional taxonomy covering critical regulatory frontiers, including bias and discrimination, fairness, personal privacy protection, and values. Crucially, our compliance dataset moves beyond shallow string-matching by incorporating contextual long-horizon interactions and logic-driven hazard chains, capturing deeply embedded compliance anomalies that bypass traditional filters. Experiment evaluations demonstrate that our framework exposes critical regulatory blind spots in state-of-the-art LLMs, offering a rigorous, AI laws and regulations-aligned benchmark to safeguard high-level and deep compliance in the application of LLMs.

Tue 22 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large language models are used in many areas, but it's hard to make sure they follow complex AI laws and rules. The authors created a new way to test these models using detailed legal knowledge and expert review to find tricky compliance problems that other tests miss. Their test covers important issues like fairness, bias, and privacy, and uses real-world scenarios where problems can happen over several steps. They found that current top language models still have important gaps in following regulations.
Open → 2609.26175v1