Ioana Baldini


2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) reproduce and exacerbate the social biases present in their training data, and resources to quantify this issue are limited. While research has attempted to identify and mitigate such biases, most efforts have been concentrated around English, lagging the rapid advancement of LLMs in multilingual settings. In this paper, we introduce a new multilingual parallel dataset SHADES to help address this issue, designed for examining culturally-specific stereotypes that may be learned by LLMs. The dataset includes stereotypes from 20 regions around the world and 16 languages, spanning multiple identity categories subject to discrimination worldwide. We demonstrate its utility in a series of exploratory evaluations for both “base” and “instruction-tuned” language models. Our results suggest that stereotypes are consistently reflected across models and languages, with some languages and models indicating much stronger stereotype biases than others.
In this tutorial, we will review and apply current automatic and manual red-teaming techniques for GenAI models(including LLMs and multimodal models). In doing so, we aim to emphasize the importance of using a mixture of techniques and establishing a balance between automatic and manual approaches. Lastly, we aim to engage tutorial participants in live red-teaming activities to collaboratively learn impactful red-teaming strategies and share insights.

2024

The widespread use of large language models has brought up essential questions about the potential biases these models might learn. This led to the development of several metrics aimed at evaluating and mitigating these biases. In this paper, we first demonstrate that prompt-based fairness metrics exhibit poor agreement, as measured by correlation, raising important questions about the reliability of fairness assessment using prompts. Then, we outline six relevant reasons why such a low correlation is observed across existing metrics. Based on these insights, we propose a method called Correlated Fairness Output (CAIRO) to enhance the correlation between fairness metrics. CAIRO augments the original prompts of a given fairness metric by using several pre-trained language models and then selects the combination of the augmented prompts that achieves the highest correlation across metrics. We show a significant improvement in Pearson correlation from 0.3 and 0.18 to 0.90 and 0.98 across metrics for gender and religion biases, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/CAIRO.
Using novel approaches to dataset development, the Biasly dataset captures the nuance and subtlety of misogyny in ways that are unique within the literature. Built in collaboration with multi-disciplinary experts and annotators themselves, the dataset contains annotations of movie subtitles, capturing colloquial expressions of misogyny in North American film. The open-source dataset can be used for a range of NLP tasks, including binary and multi-label classification, severity score regression, and text generation for rewrites. In this paper, we discuss the methodology used, analyze the annotations obtained, provide baselines for each task using common NLP algorithms, and furnish error analyses to give insight into model behaviour when fine-tuned on the Biasly dataset.

2022

The popularity of pretrained language models in natural language processing systems calls for a careful evaluation of such models in down-stream tasks, which have a higher potential for societal impact. The evaluation of such systems usually focuses on accuracy measures. Our findings in this paper call for attention to be paid to fairness measures as well. Through the analysis of more than a dozen pretrained language models of varying sizes on two toxic text classification tasks (English), we demonstrate that focusing on accuracy measures alone can lead to models with wide variation in fairness characteristics. Specifically, we observe that fairness can vary even more than accuracy with increasing training data size and different random initializations. At the same time, we find that little of the fairness variation is explained by model size, despite claims in the literature. To improve model fairness without retraining, we show that two post-processing methods developed for structured, tabular data can be successfully applied to a range of pretrained language models. Warning: This paper contains samples of offensive text.

2021