FairBelief -- Assessing Harmful Beliefs in Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Setzu, Mattia, Manerba, Marta Marchiori, Minervini, Pasquale, Nozza, Debora
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Setzu, Mattia
Manerba, Marta Marchiori
Minervini, Pasquale
Nozza, Debora
author_facet Setzu, Mattia
Manerba, Marta Marchiori
Minervini, Pasquale
Nozza, Debora
contents Language Models (LMs) have been shown to inherit undesired biases that might hurt minorities and underrepresented groups if such systems were integrated into real-world applications without careful fairness auditing. This paper proposes FairBelief, an analytical approach to capture and assess beliefs, i.e., propositions that an LM may embed with different degrees of confidence and that covertly influence its predictions. With FairBelief, we leverage prompting to study the behavior of several state-of-the-art LMs across different previously neglected axes, such as model scale and likelihood, assessing predictions on a fairness dataset specifically designed to quantify LMs' outputs' hurtfulness. Finally, we conclude with an in-depth qualitative assessment of the beliefs emitted by the models. We apply FairBelief to English LMs, revealing that, although these architectures enable high performances on diverse natural language processing tasks, they show hurtful beliefs about specific genders. Interestingly, training procedure and dataset, model scale, and architecture induce beliefs of different degrees of hurtfulness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_17389
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FairBelief -- Assessing Harmful Beliefs in Language Models
Setzu, Mattia
Manerba, Marta Marchiori
Minervini, Pasquale
Nozza, Debora
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Language Models (LMs) have been shown to inherit undesired biases that might hurt minorities and underrepresented groups if such systems were integrated into real-world applications without careful fairness auditing. This paper proposes FairBelief, an analytical approach to capture and assess beliefs, i.e., propositions that an LM may embed with different degrees of confidence and that covertly influence its predictions. With FairBelief, we leverage prompting to study the behavior of several state-of-the-art LMs across different previously neglected axes, such as model scale and likelihood, assessing predictions on a fairness dataset specifically designed to quantify LMs' outputs' hurtfulness. Finally, we conclude with an in-depth qualitative assessment of the beliefs emitted by the models. We apply FairBelief to English LMs, revealing that, although these architectures enable high performances on diverse natural language processing tasks, they show hurtful beliefs about specific genders. Interestingly, training procedure and dataset, model scale, and architecture induce beliefs of different degrees of hurtfulness.
title FairBelief -- Assessing Harmful Beliefs in Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17389