Fairness in Language Models: A Tutorial

Overview

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across various domains over the years. However, despite their promising performance on various real world tasks, most of these algorithms lack fairness considerations, potentially leading to discriminatory outcomes against marginalized demographic groups and individuals. Many recent publications have explored ways to mitigate bias in LMs. Nevertheless, a comprehensive understanding of the root causes of bias, their effects, and possible limitations of LMs from the perspective of fairness is still in its early stages. To bridge this gap, this tutorial provides a systematic overview of recent advances in fair LMs, beginning with real-world case studies, followed by an analysis of bias causes. We then explore fairness concepts specific to LMs, summarizing bias evaluation strategies and algorithms designed to promote fairness. Finally, we analyze bias in LM datasets and discuss current research challenges and open questions in the field.

Our tutorial is structured into five key parts:

  • Background on LMs
  • Quantifying Bias in LMs
  • Mitigating Bias in LMs
  • Resources for Fairness in LMs
  • Future Directions

This tutorial is grounded in our surveys and established benchmarks, all available as open-source resources :



Speakers

Zichong Wang
Ph.D. Candidate
Florida International University
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Avash Palikhe
Ph.D. Student
Florida International University
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Zhipeng Yin
Ph.D. Candidate
Florida International University
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Wenbin Zhang
Assistant Professor
Florida International University
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Agenda

Part I: Background on LMs

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- History of LMs
- Root Causes of Bias in LMs

Part II: Quantifying Bias in LMs

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- Fairness definitions for Encoder-only LMs
- Fairness definitions for Decoder-only LMs
- Fairness definitions for Encoder decoder LMs

Part III: Mitigating Bias in LMs

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- Pre-processing
- In-processing
- Intra-processing
- Post-processing

Part IV: Resources for Fairness in LMs

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- Datasets for fairness in LMs
- Other resources for fairness in LMs

Part V: Future Directions

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- Rational Counterfactual Data Augmentation
- Balancing Performance and Fairness in LMs
- Fulfilling Multiple Types of Fairness
- Theoretical Analysis and Guarantees
- Developing More and Tailored Datasets