Existing studies on fairness are largely Western-focused, making them inadequate for culturally diverse countries such as India. To address this gap, we introduce INDIC-BIAS, a comprehensive India-centric benchmark designed to evaluate fairness of LLMs across 85 identity groups encompassing diverse castes, religions, regions, and tribes. We first consult domain experts to curate over 1,800 socio-cultural topics spanning behaviors and situations, where biases and stereotypes are likely to emerge. Grounded in these topics, we generate and manually validate 20,000 real-world scenario templates to probe LLMs for fairness. We structure these templates into three evaluation tasks: plausibility, judgment, and generation. Our evaluation of 14 popular LLMs on these tasks reveals strong negative biases against marginalized identities, with models frequently reinforcing common stereotypes. Additionally, we find that models struggle to mitigate bias even when explicitly asked to rationalize their decision. Our evaluation provides evidence of both allocative and representational harms that current LLMs could cause towards Indian identities, calling for a more cautious usage in practical applications. We release INDIC-BIAS as an open-source benchmark to advance research on benchmarking and mitigating biases and stereotypes in the Indian context.

Current evaluations of Large Language Model (LLM) steering techniques focus on task-specific performance, overlooking how well steered representations align with human cognition. Using a well-established triadic similarity judgment task, we assessed steered LLMs on their ability to flexibly judge similarity between concepts based on size or kind. We found that prompt-based steering methods outperformed other methods both in terms of steering accuracy and model-to-human alignment. We also found LLMs were biased towards 'kind' similarity and struggled with 'size' alignment. This evaluation approach, grounded in human cognition, adds further support to the efficacy of prompt-based steering and reveals privileged representational axes in LLMs prior to steering.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges to evaluate recommendation systems, search engines, and other subjective tasks, where relying on human evaluators can be costly, time-consuming, and unscalable. LLMs offer an efficient solution for continuous, automated evaluation. However, since the systems that are built and improved with these judgments are ultimately designed for human use, it is crucial that LLM judgments align closely with human evaluators to ensure such systems remain human-centered. On the other hand, aligning LLM judgments with human evaluators is challenging due to individual variability and biases in human judgments. We propose a simple yet effective framework to align LLM judgments with individual human evaluators or their aggregated judgments, without retraining or fine-tuning the LLM. Our approach learns a linear mapping between the LLM's outputs and human judgments, achieving over 142% average improvement in agreement across 29 tasks with only a small number of calibration examples used for training. Notably, our method works in zero-shot and few-shot settings, exceeds inter-human agreement on four out of six tasks, and enables smaller LLMs to achieve performance comparable to that of larger models.

Existing approaches for aligning large language models with human preferences face a trade-off that requires a separate reward model (RM) for on-policy learning. In this paper, we present a novel alignment framework, SELF-JUDGE that (1) does on-policy learning and 2) is parameter efficient, as it does not require an additional RM for evaluating the samples for on-policy learning. To this end, we propose Judge-augmented Supervised Fine-Tuning (JSFT) to train a single model to act as both a policy and a judge. Specifically, we view the pairwise judgment task, choosing the better response from a response pair, as a special case of the instruction-following task. The resulting model can judge preferences of on-the-fly responses from current policy initialized from itself. Experimental results show the efficacy of SELF-JUDGE, outperforming baselines in preference benchmarks. We also show that the rejecting sampling by itself can improve performance further without an additional evaluator.

Commonsense norms are defeasible by context: reading books is usually great, but not when driving a car. While contexts can be explicitly described in language, in embodied scenarios, contexts are often provided visually. This type of visually grounded reasoning about defeasible commonsense norms is generally easy for humans, but (as we show) poses a challenge for machines, as it necessitates both visual understanding and reasoning about commonsense norms. We construct a new multimodal benchmark for studying visual-grounded commonsense norms: NORMLENS. NORMLENS consists of 10K human judgments accompanied by free-form explanations covering 2K multimodal situations, and serves as a probe to address two questions: (1) to what extent can models align with average human judgment? and (2) how well can models explain their predicted judgments? We find that state-of-the-art model judgments and explanations are not well-aligned with human annotation. Additionally, we present a new approach to better align models with humans by distilling social commonsense knowledge from large language models. The data and code are released at https://seungjuhan.me/normlens.