Bridging the Fairness Gap: Enhancing Pre-trained Models with LLM-Generated Sentences

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method to improve fairness in pre-trained language models by using carefully filtered, LLM-generated sentences to reduce gender bias without compromising language quality.

Contribution

It introduces a causal analysis-based filtering technique to incorporate LLM-generated sentences for fairer pre-trained models, addressing alignment and transfer issues.

Findings

Significant reduction in gender bias in PLMs.

Preservation of language expressiveness after debiasing.

Effective filtering of aligned sentences improves transfer quality.

Abstract

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are trained on data that inherently contains gender biases, leading to undesirable impacts. Traditional debiasing methods often rely on external corpora, which may lack quality, diversity, or demographic balance, affecting the effectiveness of debiasing. With the rise of large language models and their extensive knowledge, we propose enhancing fairness (Fair-Gender) in PLMs by absorbing coherent, attribute-balanced, and semantically rich sentences. However, these sentences cannot be directly used for debiasing due to alignment issues and the risk of negative transfer. We address this by applying causal analysis to estimate causal effects, filtering out unaligned sentences, and identifying aligned ones for incorporation into PLMs, thereby ensuring positive transfer. Experiments show that our approach significantly reduces gender biases in PLMs while preserving their language expressiveness.