Intrinsic Bias is Predicted by Pretraining Data and Correlates with Downstream Performance in Vision-Language Encoders

While recent work has found that vision-language models trained under the Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP) framework contain intrinsic social biases, the extent to which different upstream pre-training features of the framework relate to these biases, and hence how intrinsic bias and downstream performance are connected has been unclear. In this work, we present the largest comprehensive analysis to-date of how the upstream pre-training factors and downstream performance of CLIP models relate to their intrinsic biases. Studying 131 unique CLIP models, trained on 26 datasets, using 55 architectures, and in a variety of sizes, we evaluate bias in each model using 26 well-established unimodal and cross-modal principled Embedding Association Tests. We find that the choice of pre-training dataset is the most significant upstream predictor of bias, whereas architectural variations have minimal impact. Additionally, datasets curated using sophisticated filtering techniques aimed at enhancing downstream model performance tend to be associated with higher levels of intrinsic bias. Finally, we observe that intrinsic bias is often significantly correlated with downstream performance ($0.3 \leq r \leq 0.8$), suggesting that models optimized for performance inadvertently learn to amplify representational biases. Comparisons between unimodal and cross-modal association tests reveal that social group bias depends heavily on the modality. Our findings imply that more sophisticated strategies are needed to address intrinsic model bias for vision-language models across the entire model development pipeline.

Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval

Artificial intelligence (AI) hiring tools have revolutionized resume screening, and large language models (LLMs) have the potential to do the same. However, given the biases which are embedded within LLMs, it is unclear whether they can be used in this scenario without disadvantaging groups based on their protected attributes. In this work, we investigate the possibilities of using LLMs in a resume screening setting via a document retrieval framework that simulates job candidate selection. Using that framework, we then perform a resume audit study to determine whether a selection of Massive Text Embedding (MTE) models are biased in resume screening scenarios. We simulate this for nine occupations, using a collection of over 500 publicly available resumes and 500 job descriptions. We find that the MTEs are biased, significantly favoring White-associated names in 85.1\% of cases and female-associated names in only 11.1\% of cases, with a minority of cases showing no statistically significant differences. Further analyses show that Black males are disadvantaged in up to 100\% of cases, replicating real-world patterns of bias in employment settings, and validate three hypotheses of intersectionality. We also find an impact of document length as well as the corpus frequency of names in the selection of resumes. These findings have implications for widely used AI tools that are automating employment, fairness, and tech policy.