BiasBusters: Uncovering and Mitigating Tool Selection Bias in Large Language Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19133 Authors

Keywords: Tool Selection, LLM Agents, Fairness, Bias

Abstract:

Agents backed by large language models (LLMs) often rely on external tools drawn from marketplaces where multiple providers offer functionally equivalent options.
This raises a critical point concerning fairness: if selection is systematically biased, it can degrade user experience and distort competition by privileging some providers over others.
We introduce a benchmark of diverse tool categories, each containing multiple functionally equivalent tools, to evaluate tool-selection bias.
Using this benchmark, we test seven models and show that unfairness exists with models either fixating on a single provider or disproportionately preferring earlier-listed tools in context.
To investigate the origins of this bias, we conduct controlled experiments examining tool features, metadata (name, description, parameters), and pre-training exposure.
We find that: (1) semantic alignment between queries and metadata is the strongest predictor of choice; (2) perturbing descriptions significantly shifts selections; and (3) repeated pre-training exposure to a single endpoint amplifies bias.
Finally, we propose a lightweight mitigation that first filters the candidate tools to a relevant subset and then samples uniformly, reducing bias while preserving good task coverage.
Our findings highlight tool-selection bias as a key obstacle for the fair deployment of tool-augmented LLMs.

Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations

Submission Number: 19133