Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Unintended Effects of Geographic Conditioning in Large Language Models
Abstract:Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite receiving a geographically neutral user prompt. Across both creative writing and open-ended Q&A prompts, even state-of-the-art LLMs systematically favor region-specific outputs when exposed to location metadata, with leakage spiking by up to 793 times above baseline (e.g., from 0.04% to 31.7% for Llama 3.1-8B, and 21.3% and 8.8% for Qwen3-8B and Claude Sonnet 4.6, respectively). Our analysis further shows a novel structural conditioning effect: replacing the injected location with the placeholder "Unknown" still elevates leakage by up to 72 times above baseline, demonstrating that the user profile frame itself, independent of any geographic content, acts as a generative conditioning signal.
| Comments: | To appear at the Second Workshop on Customizable NLP (CustomNLP4U) at ACL 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.18124 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.18124v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18124
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
Generating in the Limit with Infinitely Many Hallucinations
Jun 30
-
Extracting Knowledge from an Arabic-English Machine-Readable Dictionary Using Information Extraction
Jun 30
-
Developmental Trajectories of Situation Modeling and Mentalizing in Transformer Language Models
Jun 30
-
A French OSCE Dialogue Dataset and Controllable Virtual Patient System for Clinical Training
Jun 30
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.