STARDTOX: Is Fairness in Language Models Just a Few Prompts Away?

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission4452 Authors

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce outputs that reflect social biases, toxicity, or unfair treatment of demographic groups, undermining trust and fairness. While prior mitigation strategies frequently rely on complex architectures, access to model internals, or costly fine-tuning, we argue that simplicity can be a strength. We introduce STARDTOX, a lightweight, critique-and-revise multi-agent framework that leverages the LLM’s own internal knowledge, via a small number of coordinated prompts, to self-correct harmful outputs. Dedicated agents independently assess bias and overall output quality, and their feedback is integrated to guide prompt-based revision. Without modifying model weights or requiring any extra fine-tuning, STARDTOX offers strong bias mitigation and high-quality outputs across both open-ended text generation and structured tasks, outperforming other baselines. For the text generation task, on the RealToxicityPrompt dataset, it reduces toxicity by over 50% compared to other baselines, while maintaining over 90% fluency. In addition, in structured tasks, on the BBQ benchmark, it achieves the lowest bias scores across both ambiguous and disambiguated examples, without sacrificing accuracy.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Research Area Keywords: NLP, Fairness, Agent

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Keywords: LLM, Fairness, Agents

Submission Number: 4452