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Main Authors: Dwivedi-Yu, Jane, Dwivedi, Raaz, Schick, Timo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06619
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author Dwivedi-Yu, Jane
Dwivedi, Raaz
Schick, Timo
author_facet Dwivedi-Yu, Jane
Dwivedi, Raaz
Schick, Timo
contents The accurate evaluation of differential treatment in language models to specific groups is critical to ensuring a positive and safe user experience. An ideal evaluation should have the properties of being robust, extendable to new groups or attributes, and being able to capture biases that appear in typical usage (rather than just extreme, rare cases). Relatedly, bias evaluation should surface not only egregious biases but also ones that are subtle and commonplace, such as a likelihood for talking about appearances with regard to women. We present FairPair, an evaluation framework for assessing differential treatment that occurs during ordinary usage. FairPair operates through counterfactual pairs, but crucially, the paired continuations are grounded in the same demographic group, which ensures equivalent comparison. Additionally, unlike prior work, our method factors in the inherent variability that comes from the generation process itself by measuring the sampling variability. We present an evaluation of several commonly used generative models and a qualitative analysis that indicates a preference for discussing family and hobbies with regard to women.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_06619
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FairPair: A Robust Evaluation of Biases in Language Models through Paired Perturbations
Dwivedi-Yu, Jane
Dwivedi, Raaz
Schick, Timo
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
The accurate evaluation of differential treatment in language models to specific groups is critical to ensuring a positive and safe user experience. An ideal evaluation should have the properties of being robust, extendable to new groups or attributes, and being able to capture biases that appear in typical usage (rather than just extreme, rare cases). Relatedly, bias evaluation should surface not only egregious biases but also ones that are subtle and commonplace, such as a likelihood for talking about appearances with regard to women. We present FairPair, an evaluation framework for assessing differential treatment that occurs during ordinary usage. FairPair operates through counterfactual pairs, but crucially, the paired continuations are grounded in the same demographic group, which ensures equivalent comparison. Additionally, unlike prior work, our method factors in the inherent variability that comes from the generation process itself by measuring the sampling variability. We present an evaluation of several commonly used generative models and a qualitative analysis that indicates a preference for discussing family and hobbies with regard to women.
title FairPair: A Robust Evaluation of Biases in Language Models through Paired Perturbations
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06619