Benchmarking adversarial robustness to bias elicitation in large language models: scalable automated assessment with LLM-as-a-judge

Abstract The growing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into critical societal domains has raised concerns about embedded biases that can perpetuate stereotypes and undermine fairness. Such biases may stem from historical inequalities in training data, linguistic imbalances, or adversarial manipulation. Despite mitigation efforts, recent studies show that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit biased outputs. This work proposes a scalable benchmarking framework to assess LLM robustness to adversarial bias elicitation. Our methodology involves: ( i ) systematically probing models across multiple tasks targeting diverse sociocultural biases, ( ii ) quantifying robustness through safety scores using an LLM-as-a-Judge approach, and ( iii ) employing jailbreak techniques to reveal safety vulnerabilities. To facilitate systematic benchmarking, we release a curated dataset of bias-related prompts, named CLEAR-Bias . Our analysis, identifying DeepSeek V3 as the most reliable judge LLM, reveals that bias resilience is uneven, with age, disability, and intersectional biases among the most prominent. Some small models outperform larger ones in safety, suggesting that training and architecture may matter more than scale. However, no model is fully robust to adversarial elicitation, with jailbreak attacks using low-resource languages or refusal suppression proving effective across model families. We also find that successive LLM generations exhibit slight safety gains, while models fine-tuned for the medical domain tend to be less safe than their general-purpose counterparts.

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Publication Details

Journal
Machine Learning
Published
2025-10-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10994-025-06862-6
Citations
1
Primary Topic
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
2.48
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article

Benchmarking adversarial robustness to bias elicitation in large language models: scalable automated assessment with LLM-as-a-judge

Alessio Orsino, Domenico Talia, Riccardo Cantini, Manuela De Ruggiero
1 citations
Machine Learning
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
2.48
article

Benchmarking adversarial robustness to bias elicitation in large language models: scalable automated assessment with LLM-as-a-judge

Alessio Orsino, Domenico Talia, Riccardo Cantini, Manuela De Ruggiero
article en
1 citations

Abstract

Abstract The growing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into critical societal domains has raised concerns about embedded biases that can perpetuate stereotypes and undermine fairness. Such biases may stem from historical inequalities in training data, linguistic imbalances, or adversarial manipulation. Despite mitigation efforts, recent studies show that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit biased outputs. This work proposes a scalable benchmarking framework to assess LLM robustness to adversarial bias elicitation. Our methodology involves: ( i ) systematically probing models across multiple tasks targeting diverse sociocultural biases, ( ii ) quantifying robustness through safety scores using an LLM-as-a-Judge approach, and ( iii ) employing jailbreak techniques to reveal safety vulnerabilities. To facilitate systematic benchmarking, we release a curated dataset of bias-related prompts, named CLEAR-Bias . Our analysis, identifying DeepSeek V3 as the most reliable judge LLM, reveals that bias resilience is uneven, with age, disability, and intersectional biases among the most prominent. Some small models outperform larger ones in safety, suggesting that training and architecture may matter more than scale. However, no model is fully robust to adversarial elicitation, with jailbreak attacks using low-resource languages or refusal suppression proving effective across model families. We also find that successive LLM generations exhibit slight safety gains, while models fine-tuned for the medical domain tend to be less safe than their general-purpose counterparts.

Machine LearningVol. 114(11)
University of Calabria (IT)
Openalex Percentile: Top 8%
Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning
2.48
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Benchmarking adversarial robustness to bias elicitation in large language models: scalable automated assessment with LLM-as-a-judge — Alessio Orsino, Domenico Talia, et al. · Machine Learning (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS