Log-linear Guardedness and its Implications

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ravfogel, Shauli, Goldberg, Yoav, Cotterell, Ryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Ravfogel, Shauli
Goldberg, Yoav
Cotterell, Ryan
author_facet Ravfogel, Shauli
Goldberg, Yoav
Cotterell, Ryan
contents Methods for erasing human-interpretable concepts from neural representations that assume linearity have been found to be tractable and useful. However, the impact of this removal on the behavior of downstream classifiers trained on the modified representations is not fully understood. In this work, we formally define the notion of log-linear guardedness as the inability of an adversary to predict the concept directly from the representation, and study its implications. We show that, in the binary case, under certain assumptions, a downstream log-linear model cannot recover the erased concept. However, we demonstrate that a multiclass log-linear model \emph{can} be constructed that indirectly recovers the concept in some cases, pointing to the inherent limitations of log-linear guardedness as a downstream bias mitigation technique. These findings shed light on the theoretical limitations of linear erasure methods and highlight the need for further research on the connections between intrinsic and extrinsic bias in neural models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_10012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Log-linear Guardedness and its Implications
Ravfogel, Shauli
Goldberg, Yoav
Cotterell, Ryan
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Methods for erasing human-interpretable concepts from neural representations that assume linearity have been found to be tractable and useful. However, the impact of this removal on the behavior of downstream classifiers trained on the modified representations is not fully understood. In this work, we formally define the notion of log-linear guardedness as the inability of an adversary to predict the concept directly from the representation, and study its implications. We show that, in the binary case, under certain assumptions, a downstream log-linear model cannot recover the erased concept. However, we demonstrate that a multiclass log-linear model \emph{can} be constructed that indirectly recovers the concept in some cases, pointing to the inherent limitations of log-linear guardedness as a downstream bias mitigation technique. These findings shed light on the theoretical limitations of linear erasure methods and highlight the need for further research on the connections between intrinsic and extrinsic bias in neural models.
title Log-linear Guardedness and its Implications
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10012