# MAGPIE: Multi-Task Media-Bias Analysis Generalization for Pre-Trained Identification of Expressions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07910 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07910/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 112 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [Automated Hate Speech Detection and the Problem of Offensive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04009/) (2017)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [Wizard of Wikipedia: Knowledge-Powered Conversational agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01241/) (2018)
- [HateXplain: A Benchmark Dataset for Explainable Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10289/) (2020)
- [Fine-Tuning Pretrained Language Models: Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06305/) (2020)
- [FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01286/) (2018)
- [Large Scale Crowdsourcing and Characterization of Twitter Abusive Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00393/) (2018)
- [Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08914/) (2016)
- [Muppet: Massive Multi-task Representations with Pre-Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11038/) (2021)
- [ExT5: Towards Extreme Multi-Task Scaling for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10952/) (2021)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [ParlAI: A Dialog Research Software Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06476/) (2017)
- [Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09709/) (2019)
- [Stance Detection on Social Media: State of the Art and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03644/) (2020)
- [Multi-Dimensional Gender Bias Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00614/) (2020)
- [In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02670/) (2019)
- [Learning to select data for transfer learning with Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05246/) (2017)
- [Stance and Sentiment in Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.01655/) (2016)
- [Multi-Task Learning in Natural Language Processing: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09138/) (2021)
- [Identifying beneficial task relations for multi-task learning in deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08303/) (2017)
- [Neural Media Bias Detection Using Distant Supervision With BABE -- Bias Annotations By Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14557/) (2022)
- [All-in-one: Multi-task Learning for Rumour Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03713/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [The Promises and Pitfalls of LLM Annotations in Dataset Labeling: a Case Study on Media Bias Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11081/) (2024)
- [Intertwined Biases Across Social Media Spheres: Unpacking Correlations in Media Bias Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15406/) (2024)
- [SiNFluD: Creating and Evaluating Figurative Language Dataset for Sindhi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01323/) (2026)
- [MABPD: Multi-Agent Bias Probing & Detection via Structured Argument Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04841/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Media bias detection poses a complex, multifaceted problem traditionally tackled using single-task models and small in-domain datasets, consequently lacking generalizability. To address this, we introduce MAGPIE, the first large-scale multi-task pre-training approach explicitly tailored for media bias detection. To enable pre-training at scale, we present Large Bias Mixture (LBM), a compilation of 59 bias-related tasks. MAGPIE outperforms previous approaches in media bias detection on the Bias Annotation By Experts (BABE) dataset, with a relative improvement of 3.3% F1-score. MAGPIE also performs better than previous models on 5 out of 8 tasks in the Media Bias Identification Benchmark (MBIB). Using a RoBERTa encoder, MAGPIE needs only 15% of finetuning steps compared to single-task approaches. Our evaluation shows, for instance, that tasks like sentiment and emotionality boost all learning, all tasks enhance fake news detection, and scaling tasks leads to the best results. MAGPIE confirms that MTL is a promising approach for addressing media bias detection, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of existing models. Furthermore, LBM is the first available resource collection focused on media bias MTL.