Unifying Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval: New Challenges in the LLM Era
Sunhao Dai, Xu Chen, Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Zhenhua Dong, Jun Xu · 2025
With the rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs), information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines and recommender systems, have undergone a paradigm shift due to their integration. However, integrating LLMs into the IR pipelines has also introduced new challenges, particularly in the form of biases and unfairness that may disrupt the information ecosystem. This tutorial will offer a comprehensive overview of emerging and pressing bias and unfairness issues associated with integrating LLMs into IR systems. Specifically, this tutorial first unifies bias and unfairness issues as problems of distribution mismatch and further categorizes the mitigation strategies under the umbrella of distribution alignment. Then, we summarize several types of bias and unfairness issues emerging from three critical stages of LLM integration into IR systems: data collection, model development, and result evaluation. We will systematically review and analyze their definitions, characteristics, and corresponding mitigation strategies in recent literature. Finally, we will highlight some open problems and future research directions. We hope this tutorial can raise the awareness of researchers and stakeholders in the IR field and beyond regarding bias and unfairness issues in this LLM era.