Tell Me You're Biased Without Telling Me You're Biased -- Toward Revealing Implicit Biases in Medical LLMs

Abstract: LLMs that are used in medical applications are known to show biased and unfair patterns. Prior to adopting these in clinical decision-making applications, it is crucial to identify these bias patterns to enable effective mitigation of their impact. In this study, we present a novel framework combining knowledge graphs (KGs) with auxiliary LLMs to systematically reveal complex bias patterns in medical LLMs. Specifically, the proposed approach integrates adversarial perturbation techniques to identify subtle bias patterns. The approach adopts a customized multi-hop characterization of KGs to enhance the systematic evaluation of arbitrary LLMs. Through a series of comprehensive experiments (on three datasets, six LLMs, and five bias types), we show that our proposed framework has noticeably greater ability and scalability to reveal complex biased patterns of LLMs compared to other baselines.