CALM : A Multi-task Benchmark for Comprehensive Assessment of Language Model Bias

TL;DR

CALM introduces a robust, multi-task benchmark for assessing gender and race bias in language models, addressing limitations of previous measures by using diverse templates and multiple NLP tasks.

Contribution

This work presents CALM, a comprehensive, multi-task benchmark with diverse templates for more reliable bias measurement across language models.

Findings

CALM bias scores are more robust and less sensitive to template perturbations.

Larger models tend to exhibit more bias than smaller ones.

T0 models are among the least biased of the evaluated language models.

Abstract

As language models (LMs) become increasingly powerful and widely used, it is important to quantify them for sociodemographic bias with potential for harm. Prior measures of bias are sensitive to perturbations in the templates designed to compare performance across social groups, due to factors such as low diversity or limited number of templates. Also, most previous work considers only one NLP task. We introduce Comprehensive Assessment of Language Models (CALM) for robust measurement of two types of universally relevant sociodemographic bias, gender and race. CALM integrates sixteen datasets for question-answering, sentiment analysis and natural language inference. Examples from each dataset are filtered to produce 224 templates with high diversity (e.g., length, vocabulary). We assemble 50 highly frequent person names for each of seven distinct demographic groups to generate 78,400 prompts covering the three NLP tasks. Our empirical evaluation shows that CALM bias scores are more robust and far less sensitive than previous bias measurements to perturbations in the templates, such as synonym substitution, or to random subset selection of templates. We apply CALM to 20 large language models, and find that for 2 language model series, larger parameter models tend to be more biased than smaller ones. The T0 series is the least biased model families, of the 20 LLMs investigated here. The code is available at https://github.com/vipulgupta1011/CALM.