FSE 2026
Sun 5 - Thu 9 July 2026 Montreal, Canada

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 7 Jul 2026 12:10 - 12:30 at MB 3.435 - Fairness, Green and Sustainability

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational in modern language-driven software applications, profoundly influencing daily life. A critical technique in leveraging their potential is role-playing, where LLMs simulate diverse roles to enhance their real-world utility. However, while research has highlighted the presence of social biases in LLM outputs, it remains unclear whether and to what extent these biases emerge during role-playing scenarios. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on fairness testing of LLMs in role-playing scenarios. To enable this testing, we use LLMs to generate 550 social roles spanning a comprehensive set of 11 demographic attributes, producing 33,000 role-specific questions that target various forms of bias. These questions, covering Yes/No, multiple-choice, and open-ended formats, are designed to prompt LLMs to adopt specific roles and respond accordingly. We employ a combination of rule-based and LLM-based strategies to identify biased responses, rigorously validated through human evaluation. Using the generated questions as the test cases, we conduct extensive evaluations of 10 advanced LLMs. The evaluation reveal 107,580 biased responses across the studied LLMs, with individual models yielding between 7,579 and 16,963 biased responses, underscoring the prevalence of bias in role-playing contexts. To support future research, we have publicly released the dataset, along with all scripts and experimental results.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Tue 7 Jul

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

11:00 - 12:30
11:00
20m
Research paper
Carbon-Taxed Transformers: A Green Compression Pipeline for Overgrown Language Models
Research Papers
Ajmain Inqiad Alam University of Saskatchewan, Palash Ranjan Roy University of Saskatchewan, Chanchal K. Roy University of Saskatchewan, Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan, Kevin Schneider University of Saskatchewan
Pre-print
11:20
10m
Talk
Advancing Evidence-Based Social Sustainability in Software Engineering: A Research Roadmap
Ideas, Visions and Reflections
Bimpe Ayoola Dalhousie University, Anielle Andrade Federal University of Pampa, Paul Ralph Dalhousie University, Ronnie de Souza Santos University of Calgary
11:30
20m
Talk
Practical Feasibility of Sustainable Software Engineering Tools and Techniques
Industry Papers
Satwik Ghanta University of Glasgow, Peggy Gregory University of Glasgow, UK, Gül Calikli University of Glasgow
11:50
20m
Talk
Adopting Concepts for Sustainable Improvement of the Developer Experience within a Medium-sized Corporation
Industry Papers
Jannik Lange Munich University of Applied Sciences, Axel Böttcher Munich University of Applied Sciences
12:10
20m
Talk
Fairness Testing of Large Language Models in Role-Playing
Research Papers
Xinyue Li Peking University, Zhenpeng Chen Tsinghua University, Jie M. Zhang Mistral AI and King's College London, Ying Xiao , Li Tianlin , Weisong Sun Nanyang Technological University, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University, Yiling Lou University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Xuanzhe Liu Peking University