BLIND: Bias Removal With No Demographics

Hadas Orgad, Yonatan Belinkov


Abstract
Models trained on real-world data tend to imitate and amplify social biases. Common methods to mitigate biases require prior information on the types of biases that should be mitigated (e.g., gender or racial bias) and the social groups associated with each data sample. In this work, we introduce BLIND, a method for bias removal with no prior knowledge of the demographics in the dataset. While training a model on a downstream task, BLIND detects biased samples using an auxiliary model that predicts the main model’s success, and down-weights those samples during the training process. Experiments with racial and gender biases in sentiment classification and occupation classification tasks demonstrate that BLIND mitigates social biases without relying on a costly demographic annotation process. Our method is competitive with other methods that require demographic information and sometimes even surpasses them.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.490
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8801–8821
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.490
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.490
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hadas Orgad and Yonatan Belinkov. 2023. BLIND: Bias Removal With No Demographics. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8801–8821, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BLIND: Bias Removal With No Demographics (Orgad & Belinkov, ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.490.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.490.mp4