A Trip Towards Fairness: Bias and De-Biasing in Large Language Models

Leonardo Ranaldi, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Davide Venditti, Dario Onorati, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto

Abstract
Cheap-to-Build Very Large-Language Models (CtB-LLMs) with affordable training are emerging as the next big revolution in natural language processing and understanding. These CtB-LLMs are democratizing access to trainable Very Large-Language Models (VLLMs) and, thus, may represent the building blocks of many NLP systems solving downstream tasks. Hence, a little or a large bias in CtB-LLMs may cause huge harm. In this paper, we performed a large investigation of the bias of three families of CtB-LLMs, and we showed that debiasing techniques are effective and usable. Indeed, according to current tests, the LLaMA and the OPT families have an important bias in gender, race, religion, and profession. In contrast to the analysis for other LMMs, we discovered that bias depends not on the number of parameters but on the perplexity. Finally, the debiasing of OPT using LORA reduces bias up to 4.12 points in the normalized stereotype score.
Anthology ID:
2024.starsem-1.30
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Danushka Bollegala, Vered Shwartz
Venue:
*SEM
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
372–384
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.starsem-1.30
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.starsem-1.30
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leonardo Ranaldi, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Davide Venditti, Dario Onorati, and Fabio Massimo Zanzotto. 2024. A Trip Towards Fairness: Bias and De-Biasing in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024), pages 372–384, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Trip Towards Fairness: Bias and De-Biasing in Large Language Models (Ranaldi et al., *SEM 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2024.starsem-1.30.pdf
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