The propagation of offensive content through social media channels has garnered attention of the research community. Multiple works have proposed various semantically related yet subtle distinct categories of offensive speech. In this work, we explore meta-learning approaches to leverage the diversity of offensive speech corpora to enhance their reliable and efficient detection. We propose a joint embedding architecture that incorporates the input’s label and definition for classification via Prototypical Network. Our model achieves at least 75% of the maximal F1-score while using less than 10% of the available training data across 4 datasets. Our experimental findings also provide a case study of training strategies valuable to combat resource scarcity.

Efficient finetuning of pretrained language transformers is becoming increasingly prevalent for solving natural language processing tasks. While effective, it can still require a large number of tunable parameters. This can be a drawback for low-resource applications and training with differential-privacy constraints, where excessive noise may be introduced during finetuning. To this end, we propose a novel language transformer finetuning strategy that introduces task-specific parameters in multiple transformer layers. These parameters are derived from fixed random projections of a single trainable vector, enabling finetuning with significantly fewer parameters while maintaining performance. We achieve within 5% of full finetuning performance on GLUE tasks with as few as 4,100 parameters per task, outperforming other parameter-efficient finetuning approaches that use a similar number of per-task parameters. Besides, the random projections can be precomputed at inference, avoiding additional computational latency. All these make our method particularly appealing for low-resource applications. Finally, our method achieves the best or comparable utility compared to several recent finetuning methods when training with the same privacy constraints, underscoring its effectiveness and potential real-world impact.

Language models excel at generating coherent text, and model compression techniques such as knowledge distillation have enabled their use in resource-constrained settings. However, these models can be biased in multiple ways, including the unfounded association of male and female genders with gender-neutral professions. Therefore, knowledge distillation without any fairness constraints may preserve or exaggerate the teacher model’s biases onto the distilled model. To this end, we present a novel approach to mitigate gender disparity in text generation by learning a fair model during knowledge distillation. We propose two modifications to the base knowledge distillation based on counterfactual role reversal—modifying teacher probabilities and augmenting the training set. We evaluate gender polarity across professions in open-ended text generated from the resulting distilled and finetuned GPT–2 models and demonstrate a substantial reduction in gender disparity with only a minor compromise in utility. Finally, we observe that language models that reduce gender polarity in language generation do not improve embedding fairness or downstream classification fairness.

The widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in consequential domains, such as health-care and parole decision-making systems, has drawn intense scrutiny on the fairness of these methods. However, ensuring fairness is often insufficient as the rationale for a contentious decision needs to be audited, understood, and defended. We propose that the attention mechanism can be used to ensure fair outcomes while simultaneously providing feature attributions to account for how a decision was made. Toward this goal, we design an attention-based model that can be leveraged as an attribution framework. It can identify features responsible for both performance and fairness of the model through attention interventions and attention weight manipulation. Using this attribution framework, we then design a post-processing bias mitigation strategy and compare it with a suite of baselines. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by conducting experiments on two distinct data types, tabular and textual.