Mitigating LLM biases toward spurious social contexts using direct preference optimization

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 2 Apr 2026] Mitigating LLM biases toward spurious social contexts using direct preference optimization Hyunji Nam, Dorottya Demszky LLMs are increasingly used for high-stakes decision-making, yet their sensitivity to spurious contextual information can introduce harmful biases. This is a critical concern when models are deployed for tasks like evaluating teachers' instructional quality, where biased assessment can affect teachers' professional development and career trajectories. We investigate model robustness to spurious social contexts using the largest publicly available dataset of U.S. classroom transcripts (NCTE) paired with expert rubric scores. Evaluating seven frontier and open-weight models across seven categories of spurious contexts -- including teacher experience, education level, demographic identity, and sycophancy-inducing framings -- we find that irrelevant contextual information can shift model predictions by up to 1.48 points on a 7-point scale, with larger models sometimes exhibiting greater sensitivity despite higher predictive accuracy. Mitigations using prompts and standard direct preference optimization (DPO) prove largely insufficient. We propose **Debiasing-DPO**,, a self-supervised training method that pairs neutral reasoning generated from the query alone, with the model's biased reasoning generated with both the query and additional spurious context. We further combine this objective with supervised fine-tuning on ground-truth labels to prevent losses in predictive accuracy. Applied to Llama 3B \& 8B and Qwen 3B \& 7B Instruct models, Debiasing-DPO reduces bias by 84\% and improves predictive accuracy by 52\% on average. Our findings from the educational case study highlight that robustness to spurious context is not a natural byproduct of model scaling and that our proposed method can yield substantial gains in both accuracy and robustness for prompt-based prediction tasks. Comments: 26 pages Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2604.02585 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.02585v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.02585 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Hyunji Alex Nam [view email] [v1] Thu, 2 Apr 2026 23:42:20 UTC (2,721 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)