Loading...
How Quantization Shapes Bias in Large Language Models
Marcuzzi, Federico Ning, Xuefei Schwartz, Roy Gurevych, Iryna
Marcuzzi, Federico
Ning, Xuefei
Schwartz, Roy
Gurevych, Iryna
Files
Loading...
2026.eacl-long.17.pdf
Adobe PDF, 3.09 MB
Supervisor
Department
Natural Language Processing
Embargo End Date
Type
Conference proceeding
Date
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Language
English
Collections
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Abstract
This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of how quantization affects model bias, with particular attention to its impact on individual demographic subgroups.We focus on weight and activation quantization strategies and examine their effects across a broad range of bias types, including stereotypes, fairness, toxicity, and sentiment.We employ both probability- and generated text-based metrics across 13 benchmarks and evaluate models that differ in architecture family and reasoning ability.Our findings show that quantization has a nuanced impact on bias: while it can reduce model toxicity and does not significantly impact sentiment, it tends to slightly increase stereotypes and unfairness in generative tasks, especially under aggressive compression.These trends are generally consistent across demographic categories and subgroups, and model types, although their magnitude depends on the specific setting.Overall, our results highlight the importance of carefully balancing efficiency and ethical considerations when applying quantization in practice.
Citation
F. Marcuzzi, X. Ning, R. Schwartz, I. Gurevych, "How Quantization Shapes Bias in Large Language Models," 2026, pp. 363-404.
Source
Eacl 2026 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Proceedings of the Conference Vol 1 Long Papers
Conference
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Keywords
Subjects
Source
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics