Swetasudha Panda


2022

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Don’t Just Clean It, Proxy Clean It: Mitigating Bias by Proxy in Pre-Trained Models
Swetasudha Panda | Ari Kobren | Michael Wick | Qinlan Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Transformer-based pre-trained models are known to encode societal biases not only in their contextual representations, but also in downstream predictions when fine-tuned on task-specific data. We present D-Bias, an approach that selectively eliminates stereotypical associations (e.g, co-occurrence statistics) at fine-tuning, such that the model doesn’t learn to excessively rely on those signals.D-Bias attenuates biases from both identity words and frequently co-occurring proxies, which we select using pointwise mutual information. We apply D-Bias to a) occupation classification, and b) toxicity classification and find that our approach substantially reduces downstream biases (e.g. by > 60% in toxicity classification, for identities that are most frequently flagged as toxic on online platforms).In addition, we show that D-Bias dramatically improves upon scrubbing, i.e., removing only the identity words in question. We also demonstrate that D-Bias easily extends to multiple identities, and achieves competitive performance with two recently proposed debiasing approaches: R-LACE and INLP.

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Upstream Mitigation Is Not All You Need: Testing the Bias Transfer Hypothesis in Pre-Trained Language Models
Ryan Steed | Swetasudha Panda | Ari Kobren | Michael Wick
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

A few large, homogenous, pre-trained models undergird many machine learning systems — and often, these models contain harmful stereotypes learned from the internet. We investigate the bias transfer hypothesis: the theory that social biases (such as stereotypes) internalized by large language models during pre-training transfer into harmful task-specific behavior after fine-tuning. For two classification tasks, we find that reducing intrinsic bias with controlled interventions before fine-tuning does little to mitigate the classifier’s discriminatory behavior after fine-tuning. Regression analysis suggests that downstream disparities are better explained by biases in the fine-tuning dataset. Still, pre-training plays a role: simple alterations to co-occurrence rates in the fine-tuning dataset are ineffective when the model has been pre-trained. Our results encourage practitioners to focus more on dataset quality and context-specific harms.