A Trip Towards Fairness: Bias and De-Biasing in Large Language Models

An outbreak in the popularity of transformer-based Language Models (such as GPT (Brown et al., 2020) and PaLM (Chowdhery et al., 2022)) has opened the doors to new Machine Learning applications. In particular, in Natural Language Processing and how pre-training from large text, corpora is essential in achieving remarkable results in downstream tasks. However, these Language Models seem to have inherent biases toward certain demographics reflected in their training data. While research has attempted to mitigate this problem, existing methods either fail to remove bias altogether, degrade performance, or are expensive. This paper examines the bias produced by promising Language Models when varying parameters and pre-training data. Finally, we propose a de-biasing technique that produces robust de-bias models that maintain performance on downstream tasks.