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Controlling Distributional Bias in Multi-Round LLM Generation via KL-Optimized Fine-Tuning

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While the real world is inherently stochastic, Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly evaluated on single-round inference against fixed ground truths. In this work, we shift the lens to distribution alignment: assessing whether LLMs, when prompted repeatedly, can generate outputs that adhere to a desired target distribution, e.g. reflecting real-world statistics or a uniform distribution. We formulate distribution alignment using the attributes of gender, race, and sentiment within occupational contexts. Our empirical analysis reveals that off-the-shelf LLMs and standard alignment techniques, including prompt engineering and Direct Preference Optimization, fail to reliably control output distributions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework that couples Steering Token Calibration with Semantic Alignment. We introduce a hybrid objective function combining Kullback-Leibler divergence to anchor the probability mass of latent steering tokens and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization to bind these tokens to semantically consistent responses. Experiments across six diverse datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baselines, achieving precise distributional control in attribute generation tasks.

Yanbei Jiang, Amr Keleg, Ryandito Diandaru, Jey Han Lau, Lea Frermann, Biaoyan Fang, Fajri Koto• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Distribution AlignmentGender UK Real
MAE0.084
24
Distribution AlignmentGender (US) - Real
MAE0.068
24
Distribution AlignmentAggregate of Six Datasets
Average MAE0.082
24
Story GenerationStory Generation Gender (UK) Real distribution
MAE0.22
24
Story GenerationStory Generation Gender (US) Real distribution
MAE0.25
24
Distribution AlignmentGender UK Even
MAE0.046
20
Distribution AlignmentRace Even
MAE0.072
20
Distribution AlignmentSentiment Even
MAE0.075
20
Story GenerationStory Generation Sentiment Even distribution
MAE0.13
20
Distribution AlignmentGender (US) - Even
MAE0.054
20
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