Botao Wang
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Botao Wang
2026
ARCA: Attribution-Regularized Causal Alignment for Task-Aware Bias Mitigation
Botao Wang | Lin Li | Kaize Shi | Jiahao Liu | Chong Lyu | Xian Zhong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Botao Wang | Lin Li | Kaize Shi | Jiahao Liu | Chong Lyu | Xian Zhong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Pretrained masked language models (MLMs) remain important backbones for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, as they often provide a more favorable balance between task performance and computational efficiency than large decoder-only models. However, existing debiasing methods often decouple bias mitigation from downstream fine-tuning, making it difficult to preserve the mitigation effects after task adaptation. To address this, we propose ARCA (Attribution-Regularized Causal Alignment), an end-to-end framework that unifies debiasing quality and task utility. ARCA uses differential gradient attribution to identify task-specific bias words and regularize the intervention for causal alignment on counterfactual samples. This single-pipeline approach enables joint optimization of task utility and debiasing. Experiments on three mainstream NLU tasks show that ARCA achieves a strong trade-off between bias mitigation and task utility compared with representative debiasing baselines.