Social Bias Evaluation for Large Language Models Requires Prompt Variations

Abstract

Warning: This paper contains examples of stereotypes and biases. Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit considerable social biases, and various studies have tried to evaluate and mitigate these biases accurately. Previous studies use downstream tasks as prompts to examine the degree of social biases for evaluation and mitigation. While LLMs' output highly depends on prompts, previous studies evaluating and mitigating bias have often relied on a limited variety of prompts. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of LLMs when changing prompt variations (task instruction and prompt, few-shot examples, debias-prompt) by analyzing task performance and social bias of LLMs. Our experimental results reveal that LLMs are highly sensitive to prompts to the extent that the ranking of LLMs fluctuates when comparing models for task performance and social bias. Additionally, we show that LLMs have tradeoffs between performance and social bias caused by the prompts. Less bias from prompt setting may result in reduced performance. Moreover, the ambiguity of instances is one of the reasons for this sensitivity to prompts in advanced LLMs, leading to various outputs. We recommend using diverse prompts, as in this study, to compare the effects of prompts on social bias in LLMs.