FairDistillation: Mitigating Stereotyping in Language Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Large pre-trained language models are successfully being used in a variety of tasks, across many languages. With this ever-increasing usage, the risk of harmful side effects also rises, for example by reproducing and reinforcing stereotypes. However, detecting and mitigating these harms is difficult to do in general and becomes computationally expensive when tackling multiple languages or when considering different biases. To address this, we present FairDistillation: a cross-lingual method based on knowledge distillation to construct smaller language models while controlling for specific biases. We found that our distillation method does not negatively affect the downstream performance on most tasks and successfully mitigates stereotyping and representational harms. We demonstrate that FairDistillation can create fairer language models at a considerably lower cost than alternative approaches.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2022.
Builds on
30 of 41 references.
References · 30
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18 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 3; 2025: 1; 2026: 1.
8 papers.
- 2023Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 626
- 2023A Survey on Fairness in Large Language Modelscited by 91
- 2024Bias in Large Language Models: Origin, Evaluation, and Mitigationcited by 77
- 2024Beyond Behaviorist Representational Harms: A Plan for Measurement and Mitigationcited by 17
- 2023Tackling Bias in Pre-trained Language Models: Current Trends and Under-represented Societiescited by 11
- 2025Why is prompting hard? Understanding prompts on binary sequence predictorscited by 4
- 2024An investigation of structures responsible for gender bias in BERT and DistilBERTcited by 3
- 2026Bias In, Bias Out? Finding Unbiased Subnetworks in Vanilla Modelscited by 0
- 2026Bias In, Bias Out? Finding Unbiased Subnetworks in Vanilla Models5 Mar 2026
- 2025Why is prompting hard? Understanding prompts on binary sequence predictors15 Feb 2025
- 2024Bias in Large Language Models: Origin, Evaluation, and Mitigation16 Nov 2024
- 2024Beyond Behaviorist Representational Harms: A Plan for Measurement and Mitigation25 Jan 2024
- 2024An investigation of structures responsible for gender bias in BERT and DistilBERT12 Jan 2024
- 2023Tackling Bias in Pre-trained Language Models: Current Trends and Under-represented Societies3 Dec 2023
- 2023Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models: A Survey2 Sep 2023
- 2023A Survey on Fairness in Large Language Models20 Aug 2023