Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Madhavan, Rahul, Wadhawan, Kahini
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11229
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929245174890496
author Madhavan, Rahul
Wadhawan, Kahini
author_facet Madhavan, Rahul
Wadhawan, Kahini
contents We study attribute control in language models through the method of Causal Average Treatment Effect (Causal ATE). Existing methods for the attribute control task in Language Models (LMs) check for the co-occurrence of words in a sentence with the attribute of interest, and control for them. However, spurious correlation of the words with the attribute in the training dataset, can cause models to hallucinate the presence of the attribute when presented with the spurious correlate during inference. We show that the simple perturbation-based method of Causal ATE removes this unintended effect. Specifically, we ground it in the problem of toxicity mitigation, where a significant challenge lies in the inadvertent bias that often emerges towards protected groups post detoxification. We show that this unintended bias can be solved by the use of the Causal ATE metric and rigorously prove our claim. We provide experimental validations for our claims and release our code (anonymously) here: https://github.com/causalate-mitigates-bias/causal-ate-mitigates-bias.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_11229
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal ATE Mitigates Unintended Bias in Controlled Text Generation
Madhavan, Rahul
Wadhawan, Kahini
Computation and Language
We study attribute control in language models through the method of Causal Average Treatment Effect (Causal ATE). Existing methods for the attribute control task in Language Models (LMs) check for the co-occurrence of words in a sentence with the attribute of interest, and control for them. However, spurious correlation of the words with the attribute in the training dataset, can cause models to hallucinate the presence of the attribute when presented with the spurious correlate during inference. We show that the simple perturbation-based method of Causal ATE removes this unintended effect. Specifically, we ground it in the problem of toxicity mitigation, where a significant challenge lies in the inadvertent bias that often emerges towards protected groups post detoxification. We show that this unintended bias can be solved by the use of the Causal ATE metric and rigorously prove our claim. We provide experimental validations for our claims and release our code (anonymously) here: https://github.com/causalate-mitigates-bias/causal-ate-mitigates-bias.
title Causal ATE Mitigates Unintended Bias in Controlled Text Generation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.11229