Debiasing Text Safety Classifiers through a Fairness-Aware Ensemble

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sturman, Olivia, Joshi, Aparna, Radharapu, Bhaktipriya, Kumar, Piyush, Shelby, Renee
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Sturman, Olivia
Joshi, Aparna
Radharapu, Bhaktipriya
Kumar, Piyush
Shelby, Renee
author_facet Sturman, Olivia
Joshi, Aparna
Radharapu, Bhaktipriya
Kumar, Piyush
Shelby, Renee
contents Increasing use of large language models (LLMs) demand performant guardrails to ensure the safety of inputs and outputs of LLMs. When these safeguards are trained on imbalanced data, they can learn the societal biases. We present a light-weight, post-processing method for mitigating counterfactual fairness in closed-source text safety classifiers. Our approach involves building an ensemble that not only outperforms the input classifiers and policy-aligns them, but also acts as a debiasing regularizer. We introduce two threshold-agnostic metrics to assess the counterfactual fairness of a model, and demonstrate how combining these metrics with Fair Data Reweighting (FDW) helps mitigate biases. We create an expanded Open AI dataset, and a new templated LLM-generated dataset based on user-prompts, both of which are counterfactually balanced across identity groups and cover four key areas of safety; we will work towards publicly releasing these datasets. Our results show that our approach improves counterfactual fairness with minimal impact on model performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_13705
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Debiasing Text Safety Classifiers through a Fairness-Aware Ensemble
Sturman, Olivia
Joshi, Aparna
Radharapu, Bhaktipriya
Kumar, Piyush
Shelby, Renee
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Increasing use of large language models (LLMs) demand performant guardrails to ensure the safety of inputs and outputs of LLMs. When these safeguards are trained on imbalanced data, they can learn the societal biases. We present a light-weight, post-processing method for mitigating counterfactual fairness in closed-source text safety classifiers. Our approach involves building an ensemble that not only outperforms the input classifiers and policy-aligns them, but also acts as a debiasing regularizer. We introduce two threshold-agnostic metrics to assess the counterfactual fairness of a model, and demonstrate how combining these metrics with Fair Data Reweighting (FDW) helps mitigate biases. We create an expanded Open AI dataset, and a new templated LLM-generated dataset based on user-prompts, both of which are counterfactually balanced across identity groups and cover four key areas of safety; we will work towards publicly releasing these datasets. Our results show that our approach improves counterfactual fairness with minimal impact on model performance.
title Debiasing Text Safety Classifiers through a Fairness-Aware Ensemble
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.13705