Intent-Aware Self-Correction for Mitigating Social Biases in Large Language Models

Self-Correction based on feedback improves the output quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). Moreover, as Self-Correction functions like the slow and conscious System-2 thinking from cognitive psychology's perspective, it can potentially reduce LLMs' social biases. LLMs are sensitive to contextual ambiguities and inconsistencies; therefore, explicitly communicating their intentions during interactions when applying Self-Correction for debiasing is crucial. In this study, we demonstrate that clarifying intentions is essential for effectively reducing biases in LLMs through Self-Correction. We divide the components needed for Self-Correction into three parts: instruction, response, and feedback, and clarify intentions at each component. We incorporate an explicit debiasing prompt to convey the intention of bias mitigation from the instruction for response generation. In the response, we use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to clarify the reasoning process. In the feedback, we define evaluation aspects necessary for debiasing and propose clear feedback through multi-aspect critiques and scoring. Through experiments, we demonstrate that self-correcting CoT responses obtained from a debiasing prompt based on multi-aspect feedback can reduce biased responses more robustly and consistently than the baselines. We also find the variation in debiasing efficacy when using models with different bias levels or separating models for response and feedback generation.

Evaluating Gender Bias of Pre-trained Language Models in Natural Language Inference by Considering All Labels

Discriminatory social biases, including gender biases, have been found in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). In Natural Language Inference (NLI), recent bias evaluation methods have observed biased inferences from the outputs of a particular label such as neutral or entailment. However, since different biased inferences can be associated with different output labels, it is inaccurate for a method to rely on one label. In this work, we propose an evaluation method that considers all labels in the NLI task. We create evaluation data and assign them into groups based on their expected biased output labels. Then, we define a bias measure based on the corresponding label output of each data group. In the experiment, we propose a meta-evaluation method for NLI bias measures, and then use it to confirm that our measure can evaluate bias more accurately than the baseline. Moreover, we show that our evaluation method is applicable to multiple languages by conducting the meta-evaluation on PLMs in three different languages: English, Japanese, and Chinese. Finally, we evaluate PLMs of each language to confirm their bias tendency. To our knowledge, we are the first to build evaluation datasets and measure the bias of PLMs from the NLI task in Japanese and Chinese.