Improving Fairness in LLMs Through Testing-Time Adversaries
This addresses fairness issues for users of LLMs in ethically sensitive applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing adversarial testing approaches.
The paper tackles bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) by proposing a testing-time adversarial method that modifies sentence attributes to detect and mitigate inconsistencies, improving fairness metrics by up to 27 percentage points on Llama3.
Large Language Models (LLMs) push the bound-aries in natural language processing and generative AI, driving progress across various aspects of modern society. Unfortunately, the pervasive issue of bias in LLMs responses (i.e., predictions) poses a significant and open challenge, hindering their application in tasks involving ethical sensitivity and responsible decision-making. In this work, we propose a straightforward, user-friendly and practical method to mitigate such biases, enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of LLMs. Our method creates multiple variations of a given sentence by modifying specific attributes and evaluates the corresponding prediction behavior compared to the original, unaltered, prediction/sentence. The idea behind this process is that critical ethical predictions often exhibit notable inconsistencies, indicating the presence of bias. Unlike previous approaches, our method relies solely on forward passes (i.e., testing-time adversaries), eliminating the need for training, fine-tuning, or prior knowledge of the training data distribution. Through extensive experiments on the popular Llama family, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving various fairness metrics, focusing on the reduction of disparities in how the model treats individuals from different racial groups. Specifically, using standard metrics, we improve the fairness in Llama3 in up to 27 percentage points. Overall, our approach significantly enhances fairness, equity, and reliability in LLM-generated results without parameter tuning or training data modifications, confirming its effectiveness in practical scenarios. We believe our work establishes an important step toward enabling the use of LLMs in tasks that require ethical considerations and responsible decision-making.