研究大模型生成数据时如何继承并放大偏见,提出有效缓解策略。
Understanding and Mitigating Bias Inheritance in LLM-based Data Augmentation on Downstream Tasks
- 用真实与合成数据混合训练,系统测试偏见传播机制。
- 发现合成数据会显著降低相关任务的公平性与性能表现。
- 提出三种针对性缓解方法,适配不同偏见类型与任务。
通过大语言模型(LLM)生成合成数据已成为提升模型性能的有前景方法。然而,LLMs本身反映其训练数据中的偏见,导致一个关键挑战:当模型在合成数据上训练时,可能传播并放大固有偏见,严重影响下游任务的公平性与鲁棒性——我们称之为偏见继承。本文首次系统性地探究、分析并缓解偏见继承现象。我们使用真实数据与不同偏见比例的LLM增强数据混合微调模型,在10个分类与生成任务中系统评估6种不同类型偏见的表现。结果表明,偏见继承会损害与偏见直接相关的分类与生成任务性能。进一步分析识别出三个关键错位因素:价值错位、群体数据错位与数据分布错位。基于此,我们提出三种缓解策略:基于标记、基于掩码和基于损失的方法,这些方法在不同任务和偏见类型上表现各异,揭示了缓解偏见继承的显著挑战。本工作为大模型数据增强研究提供重要洞见。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Generating synthetic datasets via large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to improve LLM performance. However, LLMs inherently reflect biases in their training data, leading to a critical challenge: when models are trained on synthetic data, they may propagate and amplify the inherent biases that can significantly impact fairness and robustness on downstream tasks-a phenomenon we term bias inheritance. This work presents the first systematic investigation in understanding, analyzing, and mitigating bias inheritance. We fine-tune LLMs with a combined dataset of real and LLM-augmented data with varied bias ratio as the proportion of augmented data. Through systematic experiments across 10 classification and generation tasks, we analyze how 6 different types of biases manifest. Our results indicate that bias inheritance harms downstream task performance in bias directly-related classification and generation tasks. Then, our analysis identifies three key misalignment factors: misalignment of values, group data, and data distributions. Based on these insights, we propose three mitigation strategies: token-based, mask-based, and loss-based approaches, which can work differently on various tasks and bias, indicating the substantial challenges to mitigate bias inheritance. We hope this work can provide insights to the research of LLM data augmentation.
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