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Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval Systems: New Challenges in the LLM Era

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arxiv 2404.11457 v2 pith:DHIZOP4G submitted 2024-04-17 cs.IR cs.AIcs.CL

classification cs.IRcs.AIcs.CL
keywords unfairnessbiasissuessystemschallengesinformationllmsdistribution
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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With the rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs), information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines and recommender systems, have undergone a significant paradigm shift. This evolution, while heralding new opportunities, introduces emerging challenges, particularly in terms of biases and unfairness, which may threaten the information ecosystem. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of existing works on emerging and pressing bias and unfairness issues in IR systems when the integration of LLMs. We first unify bias and unfairness issues as distribution mismatch problems, providing a groundwork for categorizing various mitigation strategies through distribution alignment. Subsequently, we systematically delve into the specific bias and unfairness issues arising from three critical stages of LLMs integration into IR systems: data collection, model development, and result evaluation. In doing so, we meticulously review and analyze recent literature, focusing on the definitions, characteristics, and corresponding mitigation strategies associated with these issues. Finally, we identify and highlight some open problems and challenges for future work, aiming to inspire researchers and stakeholders in the IR field and beyond to better understand and mitigate bias and unfairness issues of IR in this LLM era. We also consistently maintain a GitHub repository for the relevant papers and resources in this rising direction at https://github.com/KID-22/LLM-IR-Bias-Fairness-Survey.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

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

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    cs.CL 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Fine-tuning an LLM with defect detection and utility extraction tasks makes it more robust to noisy, irrelevant, and counterfactual documents in retrieval-augmented generation.

  2. Writing Style Matters: An Examination of Bias and Fairness in Information Retrieval Systems

    cs.IR 2024-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Text embedding models used in search are biased by writing style: informal and emotive documents rank lower, and most models match the query style when retrieving.

  3. Unbiased Evaluation of Large Language Models from a Causal Perspective

    cs.AI 2025-02 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    The paper argues that perturbing benchmark questions with rule-based interventions gives a less contaminated, more interpretable evaluation of LLMs than static benchmarks or agent-generated questions.

  4. What External Knowledge is Preferred by LLMs? Characterizing and Exploring Chain of Evidence in Imperfect Context for Multi-Hop QA

    cs.CL 2024-12 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    External knowledge satisfying intent, evidence nodes, and evidence relations is preferred by LLMs, improving multi-hop QA accuracy and robustness, and can be used to enhance RAG, poisoning, and defense systems.

  5. Survey of different Large Language Model Architectures: Trends, Benchmarks, and Challenges

    cs.LG 2024-12 conditional

    A broad but error-prone survey of LLM and MLLM architectures, training methods, benchmarks, and challenges.

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