Recent studies have highlighted the issue of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) inadvertently propagating social stigmas and stereotypes, a critical concern given their widespread use. This is particularly problematic in sensitive areas like healthcare, where such biases could lead to detrimental outcomes. Our research addresses this by adapting two intrinsic bias benchmarks to quantify racial and LGBTQ+ biases in prevalent PLMs. We also empirically evaluate the effectiveness of various debiasing methods in mitigating these biases. Furthermore, we assess the impact of debiasing on both Natural Language Understanding and specific biomedical applications. Our findings reveal that while PLMs commonly exhibit healthcare-related racial and LGBTQ+ biases, the applied debiasing techniques successfully reduce these biases without compromising the models’ performance in downstream tasks.

Attention has long served as a foundational technique for generating explanations. With the recent developments made in Explainable AI (XAI), the multi-faceted nature of interpretability has become more apparent. Can attention, as an explanation method, be adapted to meet the diverse needs that our expanded understanding of interpretability demands? In this work, we aim to address this question by introducing IvRA, a framework designed to directly train a language model’s attention distribution through regularization to produce attribution explanations that align with interpretability criteria such as simulatability, faithfulness, and consistency. Our extensive experimental analysis demonstrates that IvRA outperforms existing methods in guiding language models to generate explanations that are simulatable, faithful, and consistent, in tandem with their predictions. Furthermore, we perform ablation studies to verify the robustness of IvRA across various experimental settings and to shed light on the interactions among different interpretability criteria.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their lack of interpretability has been a major concern. Current methods for interpreting LLMs are post hoc, applied after inference time, and have limitations such as their focus on low-level features and lack of explainability at higher-level text units. In this work, we introduce proto-lm, a prototypical network-based white-box framework that allows LLMs to learn immediately interpretable embeddings during the fine-tuning stage while maintaining competitive performance. Our method’s applicability and interpretability are demonstrated through experiments on a wide range of NLP tasks, and our results indicate a new possibility of creating interpretable models without sacrificing performance. This novel approach to interpretability in LLMs can pave the way for more interpretable models without the need to sacrifice performance. We release our code at https://github.com/yx131/proto-lm.