# Evaluation of Social Biases in Recent Large Pre-Trained Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06861 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06861/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [Null It Out: Guarding Protected Attributes by Iterative Nullspace Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07667/) (2020)
- [On Measuring Social Biases in Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10561/) (2019)
- [Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00453/) (2021)
- [Measuring Bias in Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07337/) (2019)
- [Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06032/) (2020)
- [Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Languages with Rich Morphology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04571/) (2019)
- [Towards Debiasing Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08100/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Survey of the Effectiveness of Debiasing Techniques for Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08527/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Language-Dependent Ethnic Bias in BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05704/) (2021)
- [Investigating Gender Bias in BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05021/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large pre-trained language models are widely used in the community. These models are usually trained on unmoderated and unfiltered data from open sources like the Internet. Due to this, biases that we see in platforms online which are a reflection of those in society are in turn captured and learned by these models. These models are deployed in applications that affect millions of people and their inherent biases are harmful to the targeted social groups. In this work, we study the general trend in bias reduction as newer pre-trained models are released. Three recent models ( ELECTRA, DeBERTa, and DistilBERT) are chosen and evaluated against two bias benchmarks, StereoSet and CrowS-Pairs. They are compared to the baseline of BERT using the associated metrics. We explore whether as advancements are made and newer, faster, lighter models are released: are they being developed responsibly such that their inherent social biases have been reduced compared to their older counterparts? The results are compiled and we find that all the models under study do exhibit biases but have generally improved as compared to BERT.