Qinyang Lu


2025

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Bias Amplification: Large Language Models as Increasingly Biased Media
Ze Wang | Zekun Wu | Yichi Zhang | Xin Guan | Navya Jain | Qinyang Lu | Saloni Gupta | Adriano Koshiyama
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Model collapse—a phenomenon where models degrade in performance due to indiscriminate use of synthetic data—is well studied. However, its role in bias amplification—the progressive reinforcement of pre-existing social biases in Large Language Models (LLMs)—remains underexplored. In this paper, we formally define the conditions for bias amplification and demonstrate through statistical simulations that bias can intensify even in the absence of sampling errors, the primary driver of model collapse. Empirically, we investigate political bias amplification in GPT-2 using a custom-built benchmark for sentence continuation tasks. Our findings reveal a progressively increasing right-leaning bias. Furthermore, we evaluate three mitigation strategies—Overfitting, Preservation, and Accumulation—and show that bias amplification persists even when model collapse is mitigated. Finally, a mechanistic interpretation identifies distinct sets of neurons responsible for model collapse and bias amplification, suggesting they arise from different underlying mechanisms.