LLM Bias Detection and Mitigation through the Lens of Desired Distributions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shrestha, Ingroj, Srinivasan, Padmini
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Shrestha, Ingroj
Srinivasan, Padmini
author_facet Shrestha, Ingroj
Srinivasan, Padmini
contents Although prior work on bias mitigation has focused on promoting social equality and demographic parity, less attention has been given to aligning LLM's outputs to desired distributions. For example, we might want to align a model with real-world distributions to support factual grounding. Thus, we define bias as deviation from a desired distribution, which may be an equal or real-world distribution, depending on application goals. We propose a weighted adaptive loss based fine-tuning method that aligns LLM's gender-profession output distribution with the desired distribution, while preserving language modeling capability. Using 3 profession sets -- male-dominated, female-dominated, and gender-balanced -- derived from U.S. labor statistics (2024), we assess both our adaptive method for reflecting reality and a non-adaptive variant for equality. Across three masked language models, bias is observed under both distributions. We achieve near-complete mitigation under equality and 30-75% reduction under real-world settings. Autoregressive LLMs show no bias under equality but notable bias under real-world settings, with the Llama Instruct models (3.2-3B, 3.1-8B) achieving a 50-62% reduction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06354
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM Bias Detection and Mitigation through the Lens of Desired Distributions
Shrestha, Ingroj
Srinivasan, Padmini
Computation and Language
Although prior work on bias mitigation has focused on promoting social equality and demographic parity, less attention has been given to aligning LLM's outputs to desired distributions. For example, we might want to align a model with real-world distributions to support factual grounding. Thus, we define bias as deviation from a desired distribution, which may be an equal or real-world distribution, depending on application goals. We propose a weighted adaptive loss based fine-tuning method that aligns LLM's gender-profession output distribution with the desired distribution, while preserving language modeling capability. Using 3 profession sets -- male-dominated, female-dominated, and gender-balanced -- derived from U.S. labor statistics (2024), we assess both our adaptive method for reflecting reality and a non-adaptive variant for equality. Across three masked language models, bias is observed under both distributions. We achieve near-complete mitigation under equality and 30-75% reduction under real-world settings. Autoregressive LLMs show no bias under equality but notable bias under real-world settings, with the Llama Instruct models (3.2-3B, 3.1-8B) achieving a 50-62% reduction.
title LLM Bias Detection and Mitigation through the Lens of Desired Distributions
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06354