Language Models Get A Gender Makeover: Mitigating Gender Bias With Few-shot Data Interventions | Awesome LLM Papers

Language Models Get A Gender Makeover: Mitigating Gender Bias With Few-shot Data Interventions

Himanshu Thakur, Atishay Jain, Praneetha Vaddamanu, Paul Pu Liang, Louis-Philippe Morency Β· Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) Β· 2023

Societal biases present in pre-trained large language models are a critical issue as these models have been shown to propagate biases in countless downstream applications, rendering them unfair towards specific groups of people. Since large-scale retraining of these models from scratch is both time and compute-expensive, a variety of approaches have been previously proposed that de-bias a pre-trained model. While the majority of current state-of-the-art debiasing methods focus on changes to the training regime, in this paper, we propose data intervention strategies as a powerful yet simple technique to reduce gender bias in pre-trained models. Specifically, we empirically show that by fine-tuning a pre-trained model on only 10 de-biased (intervened) training examples, the tendency to favor any gender is significantly reduced. Since our proposed method only needs a few training examples, our few-shot debiasing approach is highly feasible and practical. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our debiasing technique performs better than competitive state-of-the-art baselines with minimal loss in language modeling ability.

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