A Toolbox for Surfacing Health Equity Harms and Biases in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pfohl, Stephen R., Cole-Lewis, Heather, Sayres, Rory, Neal, Darlene, Asiedu, Mercy, Dieng, Awa, Tomasev, Nenad, Rashid, Qazi Mamunur, Azizi, Shekoofeh, Rostamzadeh, Negar, McCoy, Liam G., Celi, Leo Anthony, Liu, Yun, Schaekermann, Mike, Walton, Alanna, Parrish, Alicia, Nagpal, Chirag, Singh, Preeti, Dewitt, Akeiylah, Mansfield, Philip, Prakash, Sushant, Heller, Katherine, Karthikesalingam, Alan, Semturs, Christopher, Barral, Joelle, Corrado, Greg, Matias, Yossi, Smith-Loud, Jamila, Horn, Ivor, Singhal, Karan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Pfohl, Stephen R.
Cole-Lewis, Heather
Sayres, Rory
Neal, Darlene
Asiedu, Mercy
Dieng, Awa
Tomasev, Nenad
Rashid, Qazi Mamunur
Azizi, Shekoofeh
Rostamzadeh, Negar
McCoy, Liam G.
Celi, Leo Anthony
Liu, Yun
Schaekermann, Mike
Walton, Alanna
Parrish, Alicia
Nagpal, Chirag
Singh, Preeti
Dewitt, Akeiylah
Mansfield, Philip
Prakash, Sushant
Heller, Katherine
Karthikesalingam, Alan
Semturs, Christopher
Barral, Joelle
Corrado, Greg
Matias, Yossi
Smith-Loud, Jamila
Horn, Ivor
Singhal, Karan
author_facet Pfohl, Stephen R.
Cole-Lewis, Heather
Sayres, Rory
Neal, Darlene
Asiedu, Mercy
Dieng, Awa
Tomasev, Nenad
Rashid, Qazi Mamunur
Azizi, Shekoofeh
Rostamzadeh, Negar
McCoy, Liam G.
Celi, Leo Anthony
Liu, Yun
Schaekermann, Mike
Walton, Alanna
Parrish, Alicia
Nagpal, Chirag
Singh, Preeti
Dewitt, Akeiylah
Mansfield, Philip
Prakash, Sushant
Heller, Katherine
Karthikesalingam, Alan
Semturs, Christopher
Barral, Joelle
Corrado, Greg
Matias, Yossi
Smith-Loud, Jamila
Horn, Ivor
Singhal, Karan
contents Large language models (LLMs) hold promise to serve complex health information needs but also have the potential to introduce harm and exacerbate health disparities. Reliably evaluating equity-related model failures is a critical step toward developing systems that promote health equity. We present resources and methodologies for surfacing biases with potential to precipitate equity-related harms in long-form, LLM-generated answers to medical questions and conduct a large-scale empirical case study with the Med-PaLM 2 LLM. Our contributions include a multifactorial framework for human assessment of LLM-generated answers for biases, and EquityMedQA, a collection of seven datasets enriched for adversarial queries. Both our human assessment framework and dataset design process are grounded in an iterative participatory approach and review of Med-PaLM 2 answers. Through our empirical study, we find that our approach surfaces biases that may be missed via narrower evaluation approaches. Our experience underscores the importance of using diverse assessment methodologies and involving raters of varying backgrounds and expertise. While our approach is not sufficient to holistically assess whether the deployment of an AI system promotes equitable health outcomes, we hope that it can be leveraged and built upon towards a shared goal of LLMs that promote accessible and equitable healthcare.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_12025
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Toolbox for Surfacing Health Equity Harms and Biases in Large Language Models
Pfohl, Stephen R.
Cole-Lewis, Heather
Sayres, Rory
Neal, Darlene
Asiedu, Mercy
Dieng, Awa
Tomasev, Nenad
Rashid, Qazi Mamunur
Azizi, Shekoofeh
Rostamzadeh, Negar
McCoy, Liam G.
Celi, Leo Anthony
Liu, Yun
Schaekermann, Mike
Walton, Alanna
Parrish, Alicia
Nagpal, Chirag
Singh, Preeti
Dewitt, Akeiylah
Mansfield, Philip
Prakash, Sushant
Heller, Katherine
Karthikesalingam, Alan
Semturs, Christopher
Barral, Joelle
Corrado, Greg
Matias, Yossi
Smith-Loud, Jamila
Horn, Ivor
Singhal, Karan
Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) hold promise to serve complex health information needs but also have the potential to introduce harm and exacerbate health disparities. Reliably evaluating equity-related model failures is a critical step toward developing systems that promote health equity. We present resources and methodologies for surfacing biases with potential to precipitate equity-related harms in long-form, LLM-generated answers to medical questions and conduct a large-scale empirical case study with the Med-PaLM 2 LLM. Our contributions include a multifactorial framework for human assessment of LLM-generated answers for biases, and EquityMedQA, a collection of seven datasets enriched for adversarial queries. Both our human assessment framework and dataset design process are grounded in an iterative participatory approach and review of Med-PaLM 2 answers. Through our empirical study, we find that our approach surfaces biases that may be missed via narrower evaluation approaches. Our experience underscores the importance of using diverse assessment methodologies and involving raters of varying backgrounds and expertise. While our approach is not sufficient to holistically assess whether the deployment of an AI system promotes equitable health outcomes, we hope that it can be leveraged and built upon towards a shared goal of LLMs that promote accessible and equitable healthcare.
title A Toolbox for Surfacing Health Equity Harms and Biases in Large Language Models
topic Computers and Society
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12025