Stereotype Detection in LLMs: A Multiclass, Explainable, and Benchmark-Driven Approach
This work addresses bias detection for fairer AI applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets and methods.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting subtle stereotypes in large language models (LLMs) by introducing the Multi-Grain Stereotype (MGS) dataset with 51,867 instances and developing multiclass classifiers, achieving strong performance with explainable AI tools to align model patterns with human intuitions.
Stereotype detection is a challenging and subjective task, as certain statements, such as "Black people like to play basketball," may not appear overtly toxic but still reinforce racial stereotypes. With the increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) in human-facing artificial intelligence (AI) applications, detecting these types of biases is essential. However, LLMs risk perpetuating and amplifying stereotypical outputs derived from their training data. A reliable stereotype detector is crucial for benchmarking bias, monitoring model input and output, filtering training data, and ensuring fairer model behavior in downstream applications. This paper introduces the Multi-Grain Stereotype (MGS) dataset, consisting of 51,867 instances across gender, race, profession, religion, and other stereotypes, curated from multiple existing datasets. We evaluate various machine learning approaches to establish baselines and fine-tune language models of different architectures and sizes, presenting a suite of stereotype multiclass classifiers trained on the MGS dataset. Given the subjectivity of stereotypes, explainability is essential to align model learning with human understanding of stereotypes. We employ explainable AI (XAI) tools, including SHAP, LIME, and BertViz, to assess whether the model's learned patterns align with human intuitions about stereotypes.Additionally, we develop stereotype elicitation prompts and benchmark the presence of stereotypes in text generation tasks using popular LLMs, employing the best-performing stereotype classifiers.