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Understanding and Mitigating Gender Bias in LLMs via Interpretable Neuron Editing

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arxiv 2501.14457 v1 pith:XBOFKHVE submitted 2025-01-24 cs.CL

Understanding and Mitigating Gender Bias in LLMs via Interpretable Neuron Editing

classification cs.CL
keywords biasgenderllmseditingneuronneuronscapabilitiesmodel
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit gender bias, posing challenges for their safe deployment. Existing methods to mitigate bias lack a comprehensive understanding of its mechanisms or compromise the model's core capabilities. To address these issues, we propose the CommonWords dataset, to systematically evaluate gender bias in LLMs. Our analysis reveals pervasive bias across models and identifies specific neuron circuits, including gender neurons and general neurons, responsible for this behavior. Notably, editing even a small number of general neurons can disrupt the model's overall capabilities due to hierarchical neuron interactions. Based on these insights, we propose an interpretable neuron editing method that combines logit-based and causal-based strategies to selectively target biased neurons. Experiments on five LLMs demonstrate that our method effectively reduces gender bias while preserving the model's original capabilities, outperforming existing fine-tuning and editing approaches. Our findings contribute a novel dataset, a detailed analysis of bias mechanisms, and a practical solution for mitigating gender bias in LLMs.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. GKnow: Measuring the Entanglement of Gender Bias and Factual Gender

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Gender bias and factual gender knowledge are severely entangled in language model circuits and neurons, making neuron ablation an unreliable method for debiasing.

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    MechaRule localizes agonist neurons in LLMs via contrastive hierarchical ablation to ground rule extraction in circuitry, recalling 96.8% of high-effect neurons and reducing task performance when suppressed.

  3. How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study

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    LLMs and VLMs encode viewpoint information in hidden states but fail to bind it to corresponding observations, resulting in hallucinations in final layers on text-only viewpoint rotation tasks.

  4. Demographic Prompting at Scale: When More Attributes Hurt LLM--Human Agreement

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    Across five subjective tasks and five open-source LLMs, demographic prompting improves human agreement only for 1–3 high-signal, directionally coherent attributes and degrades under the full attribute set.

  5. Neuron-Anchored Rule Extraction for Large Language Models via Contrastive Hierarchical Ablation

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    MechaRule localizes sparse agonist neurons via contrastive hierarchical ablation and adaptive group testing to ground rule extraction, recalling 97% of high-effect activations at 2.14% cost while enabling near-total e...

  6. Knowing Bias, Doing Better: Mitigating Social Bias in LLMs via Know-Bias Neuron Enhancement

    cs.AI 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0

    Amplifying neurons that encode bias awareness, found with 45 yes/no questions, reduces gender/race/religion bias in three LLMs while roughly preserving general reasoning.