Recent advancements in natural language processing, driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly improved text comprehension, enabling these models to handle complex tasks with greater efficiency. A key feature of LLMs is their ability to engage in contextual learning, which allows them to understand and apply instructions given in natural language to new scenarios without requiring additional training. This capability is particularly valuable in social media, where LLMs can be crucial in addressing challenges in explainable sexism detection. We hypothesize that by leveraging contextual learning capabilities, LLMs can provide clear, explainable insights into why certain content is flagged as problematic, thus enhancing transparency in the sexism detection process. To this end, we propose a Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) based fine-tuning framework for sexism detection. We studied two well-known LLMs, Mistral-7B and LLaMA-3-8B, in zero-shot, supervised fine-tuning, and RLHF scenarios to conclude the superior ability of LLMs in sexism detection. The experimental results reported in this work, based on three tasks of Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS), highlight the importance of RLHF for building explainable systems in online discourse. Furthermore, we found that the LLaMA-3-8B model achieves the best results using the RLHF approach, scoring 0.8681 on Task A (binary sexism detection), 0.6829 on Task B (category classification of sexism), and 0.4722 on Task C (fine-grained sexism vectors) test sets.
This study investigates the concept of the ‘right to be forgotten’ within the context of large language models (LLMs). We explore machine unlearning as a pivotal solution, with a focus on pre-trained models–a notably under-researched area. Our research delineates a comprehensive framework for machine unlearning in pre-trained LLMs, encompassing a critical analysis of seven diverse unlearning methods. Through rigorous evaluation using curated datasets from arXiv, books, and GitHub, we establish a robust benchmark for unlearning performance, demonstrating that these methods are over 105 times more computationally efficient than retraining. Our results show that integrating gradient ascent with gradient descent on in-distribution data improves hyperparameter robustness. We also provide detailed guidelines for efficient hyperparameter tuning in the unlearning process. Our findings advance the discourse on ethical AI practices, offering substantive insights into the mechanics of machine unlearning for pre-trained LLMs and underscoring the potential for responsible AI development.
Large language models are shown to present privacy risks through memorization of training data, andseveral recent works have studied such risks for the pre-training phase. Little attention, however, has been given to the fine-tuning phase and it is not well understood how different fine-tuning methods (such as fine-tuning the full model, the model head, and adapter) compare in terms of memorization risk. This presents increasing concern as the “pre-train and fine-tune” paradigm proliferates. In this paper, we empirically study memorization of fine-tuning methods using membership inference and extraction attacks, and show that their susceptibility to attacks is very different. We observe that fine-tuning the head of the model has the highest susceptibility to attacks, whereas fine-tuning smaller adapters appears to be less vulnerable to known extraction attacks.