ACL Findings2026
Multi-Persona Thinking for Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models
Yuxing Chen, Guoqing Luo, Zijun Wu, Lili Mou
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit social biases, which can lead to harmful stereotypes and unfair outcomes. We propose Multi-Persona Thinking (MPT), a simple inferencetime framework that reduces social bias by encouraging reasoning from multiple perspectives. MPT guides the model to consider contrasting social identities, such as male and female, together with a neutral viewpoint. These viewpoints then interact through an iterative reasoning process to identify and correct biased judgments. This design transforms the potential weakness of persona assignment into a mechanism to mitigate bias. We evaluate MPT on two widely used bias benchmarks with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results show that MPT achieves a lower bias than the existing prompting-based methods while maintaining the core reasoning ability. 1
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Builds on17
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- Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-FeedbackAman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 4,972 citations
- Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language ModelsXuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans, Quoc V. Le et al.ICLR 2023 · 681 citations
- In-Context Impersonation Reveals Large Language Models' Strengths and BiasesLeonard Salewski, Stephan Alaniz, Isabel Rio-Torto, Eric Schulz et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 259 citations
- Bias Runs Deep: Implicit Reasoning Biases in Persona-Assigned LLMsShashank Gupta, Vaishnavi Shrivastava, Ameet Deshpande, Ashwin Kalyan et al.ICLR 2024 · 212 citations
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