Bias Amplification: Large Language Models as Increasingly Biased Media

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wang, Ze, Wu, Zekun, Zhang, Jeremy, Guan, Xin, Jain, Navya, Lu, Skylar, Gupta, Saloni, Koshiyama, Adriano
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Wang, Ze
Wu, Zekun
Zhang, Jeremy
Guan, Xin
Jain, Navya
Lu, Skylar
Gupta, Saloni
Koshiyama, Adriano
author_facet Wang, Ze
Wu, Zekun
Zhang, Jeremy
Guan, Xin
Jain, Navya
Lu, Skylar
Gupta, Saloni
Koshiyama, Adriano
contents Model collapse, a phenomenon characterized by performance degradation due to iterative training on synthetic data, has been widely studied. However, its implications for bias amplification, the progressive intensification of pre-existing societal biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), remain significantly underexplored, despite the growing influence of LLMs in shaping online discourse. In this paper, we introduce a open, generational, and long-context benchmark specifically designed to measure political bias amplification in LLMs, leveraging sentence continuation tasks derived from a comprehensive dataset of U.S. political news. Our empirical study using GPT-2 reveals consistent and substantial political bias intensification (e.g., right-leaning amplification) over iterative synthetic training cycles. We evaluate three mitigation strategies, Overfitting, Preservation, and Accumulation, and demonstrate that bias amplification persists independently of model collapse, even when the latter is effectively controlled. Furthermore, we propose a mechanistic analysis approach that identifies neurons correlated with specific phenomena during inference through regression and statistical tests. This analysis uncovers largely distinct neuron populations driving bias amplification and model collapse, underscoring fundamentally different underlying mechanisms. Finally, we supplement our empirical findings with theoretical intuition that explains the separate origins of these phenomena, guiding targeted strategies for bias mitigation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_15234
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bias Amplification: Large Language Models as Increasingly Biased Media
Wang, Ze
Wu, Zekun
Zhang, Jeremy
Guan, Xin
Jain, Navya
Lu, Skylar
Gupta, Saloni
Koshiyama, Adriano
Artificial Intelligence
Model collapse, a phenomenon characterized by performance degradation due to iterative training on synthetic data, has been widely studied. However, its implications for bias amplification, the progressive intensification of pre-existing societal biases in Large Language Models (LLMs), remain significantly underexplored, despite the growing influence of LLMs in shaping online discourse. In this paper, we introduce a open, generational, and long-context benchmark specifically designed to measure political bias amplification in LLMs, leveraging sentence continuation tasks derived from a comprehensive dataset of U.S. political news. Our empirical study using GPT-2 reveals consistent and substantial political bias intensification (e.g., right-leaning amplification) over iterative synthetic training cycles. We evaluate three mitigation strategies, Overfitting, Preservation, and Accumulation, and demonstrate that bias amplification persists independently of model collapse, even when the latter is effectively controlled. Furthermore, we propose a mechanistic analysis approach that identifies neurons correlated with specific phenomena during inference through regression and statistical tests. This analysis uncovers largely distinct neuron populations driving bias amplification and model collapse, underscoring fundamentally different underlying mechanisms. Finally, we supplement our empirical findings with theoretical intuition that explains the separate origins of these phenomena, guiding targeted strategies for bias mitigation.
title Bias Amplification: Large Language Models as Increasingly Biased Media
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15234