User-Assistant Bias in LLMs

arXiv:2508.15815v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically trained and deployed using structured role tags (e.g. system, user, assistant, tool) that explicitly mark the source of each piece of context. While these tags are essential for instruction following and controllability, asymmetries in the training data associated with different role tags can potentially introduce inductive biases. In this paper, we study this phenomenon by formalizing user-assistant bias, defined as the tendency of an LLM to preferentially rely on information from either the user or assistant role when they provide incompatible information about the same entity in the context history. We introduce a task-agnostic benchmark UserAssist and evaluate such bias in 52 frontier models. We observe that most of the instruction-tuned models exhibit strong user bias, whereas base and reasoning models are close to neutral. Using controlled fine-tuning experiments, we isolate which post-training recipes drive the observed user-assistant bias. We find that human-preference alignment amplifies user bias, while reasoning fine-tuning reduces it. Finally, we show that user-assistant bias can be bidirectionally controlled via direct preference optimization (DPO) on UserAssist-train, and that the resulting bias reliably generalizes to two realistic multi-turn debate datasets spanning philosophical opinions and natural argumentative exchanges on factual/policy topics. These results reveal an underexplored consequence of role-tagged training and provide a principled framework to diagnose and control tag-induced biases in modern LLMs.