While a few high-quality bias benchmark datasets exist to address stereotypes in Language Models (LMs), a notable lack of focus remains on body image stereotypes. To bridge this gap, we propose BIStereo, a suite to uncover LMs’ biases towards people of certain physical appearance characteristics, namely, skin complexion, body shape, height, attire, and a miscellaneous category including hair texture, eye color, and more. Our dataset comprises 40k sentence pairs designed to assess LMs’ biased preference for certain body types. We further include 60k premise-hypothesis pairs designed to comprehensively assess LMs’ preference for fair skin tone. Additionally, we curate 553 tuples consisting of a body image descriptor, gender, and a stereotypical attribute, validated by a diverse pool of annotators for physical appearance stereotypes.We propose a metric, TriSentBias, that captures the biased preferences of LMs towards a certain body type over others. Using BIStereo, we assess the presence of body image biases in ten different language models, revealing significant biases in models Muril, XLMR, Llama3, and Gemma. We further evaluate the LMs through downstream NLI and Analogy tasks.Our NLI experiments highlight notable patterns in the LMs that align with the well-documented cognitive bias in humans known as the Halo Effect.

The pervasive influence of social biases in language data has sparked the need for benchmark datasets that capture and evaluate these biases in Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing efforts predominantly focus on English language and the Western context, leaving a void for a reliable dataset that encapsulates India’s unique socio-cultural nuances. To bridge this gap, we introduce IndiBias, a comprehensive benchmarking dataset designed specifically for evaluating social biases in the Indian context. We filter and translate the existing CrowS-Pairs dataset to create a benchmark dataset suited to the Indian context in Hindi language. Additionally, we leverage LLMs including ChatGPT and InstructGPT to augment our dataset with diverse societal biases and stereotypes prevalent in India. The included bias dimensions encompass gender, religion, caste, age, region, physical appearance, and occupation. We also build a resource to address intersectional biases along three intersectional dimensions. Our dataset contains 800 sentence pairs and 300 tuples for bias measurement across different demographics. The dataset is available in English and Hindi, providing a size comparable to existing benchmark datasets. Furthermore, using IndiBias we compare ten different language models on multiple bias measurement metrics. We observed that the language models exhibit more bias across a majority of the intersectional groups. All the scripts utilized and datasets created in this study are publicly available.