REQUAL-LM: Reliability and Equity through Aggregation in Large Language Models

Sana Ebrahimi, Nima Shahbazi, Abolfazl Asudeh


Abstract
The extensive scope of large language models (LLMs) across various domains underscores the critical importance of responsibility in their application, beyond natural language processing. In particular, the randomized nature of LLMs, coupled with inherent biases and historical stereotypes in data, raises critical concerns regarding reliability and equity. Addressing these challenges are necessary before using LLMs for applications with societal impact. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce REQUAL-LM, a novel method for finding reliable and equitable LLM outputs through aggregation. Specifically, we develop a Montecarlo method based on repeated sampling to find a reliable output close to the mean of the underlying distribution of possible outputs. We formally define the terms such as reliability and bias, and design an equity-aware aggregation to minimize harmful bias while finding a highly reliable output. REQUAL-LM does not require specialized hardware, does not impose a significant computing load, and uses LLMs as a blackbox. This design choice enables seamless scalability alongside the rapid advancement of LLM technologies. Our system does not require retraining the LLMs, which makes it deployment ready and easy to adapt. Our comprehensive experiments using various tasks and datasets demonstrate that REQUAL-LM effectively mitigates bias and selects a more equitable response, specifically the outputs that properly represents minority groups.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.37
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
549–560
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.37
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sana Ebrahimi, Nima Shahbazi, and Abolfazl Asudeh. 2024. REQUAL-LM: Reliability and Equity through Aggregation in Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 549–560, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
REQUAL-LM: Reliability and Equity through Aggregation in Large Language Models (Ebrahimi et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.37.pdf
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 2024.findings-naacl.37.copyright.pdf