# Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models by Proxy of Prediction Quality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13954/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04683/) (2017)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06876/) (2018)
- [On Measuring Social Biases in Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10561/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03310/) (2019)
- [Black is to Criminal as Caucasian is to Police: Detecting and Removing Multiclass Bias in Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04047/) (2019)
- [Unmasking the Mask -- Evaluating Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07496/) (2021)
- [Understanding Undesirable Word Embedding Associations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06361/) (2019)
- [Improving Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks via Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09482/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [PBBQ: A Persian Bias Benchmark Dataset Curated with Human-AI Collaboration for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19616/) (2025)
- [Cross-Lingual Probing and Community-Grounded Analysis of Gender Bias in Low-Resource Bengali](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17764/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance for a variety of natural language tasks but have been shown to encode unwanted biases. We evaluate the social biases encoded by transformers trained with the masked language modeling objective using proposed proxy functions within an iterative masking experiment to measure the quality of transformer models' predictions and assess the preference of MLMs towards disadvantaged and advantaged groups. We find all models encode concerning social biases. We compare bias estimations with those produced by other evaluation methods using benchmark datasets and assess their alignment with human annotated biases. We extend previous work by evaluating social biases introduced after retraining an MLM under the masked language modeling objective and find proposed measures produce more accurate and sensitive estimations of biases introduced by retraining MLMs based on relative preference for biased sentences between models, while other methods tend to underestimate biases after retraining on sentences biased towards disadvantaged groups.