Preprint
A Hidden Shift Is Not a Hidden Bias: What a Representation-Level Counterfactual Gap Certifies About an LLM Recommender, Why the Encoded-Versus-Expressed Studies Disagree, and the Placebo, Mediation and Transport Tests That Would Settle It
Life of Research (c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Fairness audits of language-model recommenders compare the lists a model returns when a single stated identity is swapped and the rest of the prompt is held fixed. A 2026 benchmark adds a second axis, the displacement of the…