REFINE-LM: Mitigating Language Model Stereotypes via Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Qureshi, Rameez, Es-Sebbani, Naïm, Galárraga, Luis, Graham, Yvette, Couceiro, Miguel, Bouraoui, Zied
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Qureshi, Rameez
Es-Sebbani, Naïm
Galárraga, Luis
Graham, Yvette
Couceiro, Miguel
Bouraoui, Zied
author_facet Qureshi, Rameez
Es-Sebbani, Naïm
Galárraga, Luis
Graham, Yvette
Couceiro, Miguel
Bouraoui, Zied
contents With the introduction of (large) language models, there has been significant concern about the unintended bias such models may inherit from their training data. A number of studies have shown that such models propagate gender stereotypes, as well as geographical and racial bias, among other biases. While existing works tackle this issue by preprocessing data and debiasing embeddings, the proposed methods require a lot of computational resources and annotation effort while being limited to certain types of biases. To address these issues, we introduce REFINE-LM, a debiasing method that uses reinforcement learning to handle different types of biases without any fine-tuning. By training a simple model on top of the word probability distribution of a LM, our bias agnostic reinforcement learning method enables model debiasing without human annotations or significant computational resources. Experiments conducted on a wide range of models, including several LMs, show that our method (i) significantly reduces stereotypical biases while preserving LMs performance; (ii) is applicable to different types of biases, generalizing across contexts such as gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality-based biases; and (iii) it is not expensive to train.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09489
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle REFINE-LM: Mitigating Language Model Stereotypes via Reinforcement Learning
Qureshi, Rameez
Es-Sebbani, Naïm
Galárraga, Luis
Graham, Yvette
Couceiro, Miguel
Bouraoui, Zied
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
With the introduction of (large) language models, there has been significant concern about the unintended bias such models may inherit from their training data. A number of studies have shown that such models propagate gender stereotypes, as well as geographical and racial bias, among other biases. While existing works tackle this issue by preprocessing data and debiasing embeddings, the proposed methods require a lot of computational resources and annotation effort while being limited to certain types of biases. To address these issues, we introduce REFINE-LM, a debiasing method that uses reinforcement learning to handle different types of biases without any fine-tuning. By training a simple model on top of the word probability distribution of a LM, our bias agnostic reinforcement learning method enables model debiasing without human annotations or significant computational resources. Experiments conducted on a wide range of models, including several LMs, show that our method (i) significantly reduces stereotypical biases while preserving LMs performance; (ii) is applicable to different types of biases, generalizing across contexts such as gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality-based biases; and (iii) it is not expensive to train.
title REFINE-LM: Mitigating Language Model Stereotypes via Reinforcement Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09489