Language Models That Walk the Talk: A Framework for Formal Fairness Certificates

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Danqing, Ladner, Tobias, Mhadhbi, Ahmed Rayen, Althoff, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Chen, Danqing
Ladner, Tobias
Mhadhbi, Ahmed Rayen
Althoff, Matthias
author_facet Chen, Danqing
Ladner, Tobias
Mhadhbi, Ahmed Rayen
Althoff, Matthias
contents As large language models become integral to high-stakes applications, ensuring their robustness and fairness is critical. Despite their success, large language models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small perturbations, such as synonym substitutions, can alter model predictions, posing risks in fairness-critical areas, such as gender bias mitigation, and safety-critical areas, such as toxicity detection. While formal verification has been explored for neural networks, its application to large language models remains limited. This work presents a holistic verification framework to certify the robustness of transformer-based language models, with a focus on ensuring gender fairness and consistent outputs across different gender-related terms. Furthermore, we extend this methodology to toxicity detection, offering formal guarantees that adversarially manipulated toxic inputs are consistently detected and appropriately censored, thereby ensuring the reliability of moderation systems. By formalizing robustness within the embedding space, this work strengthens the reliability of language models in ethical AI deployment and content moderation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12767
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language Models That Walk the Talk: A Framework for Formal Fairness Certificates
Chen, Danqing
Ladner, Tobias
Mhadhbi, Ahmed Rayen
Althoff, Matthias
Artificial Intelligence
As large language models become integral to high-stakes applications, ensuring their robustness and fairness is critical. Despite their success, large language models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small perturbations, such as synonym substitutions, can alter model predictions, posing risks in fairness-critical areas, such as gender bias mitigation, and safety-critical areas, such as toxicity detection. While formal verification has been explored for neural networks, its application to large language models remains limited. This work presents a holistic verification framework to certify the robustness of transformer-based language models, with a focus on ensuring gender fairness and consistent outputs across different gender-related terms. Furthermore, we extend this methodology to toxicity detection, offering formal guarantees that adversarially manipulated toxic inputs are consistently detected and appropriately censored, thereby ensuring the reliability of moderation systems. By formalizing robustness within the embedding space, this work strengthens the reliability of language models in ethical AI deployment and content moderation.
title Language Models That Walk the Talk: A Framework for Formal Fairness Certificates
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12767