arXiv:2605.01048cs.CLcs.LG2026-05被引 3

纠正了因果提示中误判敏感性的方法,让评估更可信。

Compared to What? Baselines and Metrics for Counterfactual Prompting

  • 用改写文本作为基线,区分目标变量与表面变化的影响
  • 医学问答数据集上性别改变仅引发14.9%预测翻转,与改写效果无差异
  • 提出新框架可识别真实方向性偏见,适合评估模型公平性

因果提示通过修改单一因素并测量输出变化来评估大模型的偏见与推理可靠性。但本文指出,未考虑语义保持的文本改写所引发的一般模型敏感性,会导致对目标因素的错误归因。因为每次因果编辑都同时包含目标变量和偶然的表面形式变化,违反了处理变异无关性。在MedQA数据集上,仅更改患者性别时预测翻转率为14.9%,而单纯改写输入的翻转率也达14.1%,两者统计上无差异,说明不能断言模型对性别特别敏感。为此,本文提出一个框架:通过统计检验比较目标干预与改写输入所产生的差异。应用该框架重新分析MedPerturb数据集,发现原报告中关于人口统计与风格线索的敏感性大多消失,仅5/120项测试显著。但在职业传记分类任务中,仍检测到显著的方向性性别偏见,证明该框架能有效识别微小但真实的偏差。我们评估了多种度量方式(聚合、样本分布、回归),发现每样本度量远强于聚合度量,回归则能独特刻画效应方向与大小。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Counterfactual prompting (i.e., perturbing a single factor and measuring output change) is widely used to evaluate things like LLM bias and CoT faithfulness. But in this work we argue that observed effects cannot be attributed to the targeted factor without accounting for baseline "meaning-preserving" modifications to text that establish general model sensitivity. This is because every counterfactual edit is a compound treatment that bundles the variable of interest with incidental surface-form variation; this violates treatment variation irrelevance. We observe prediction flip rates on MedQA of 14.9% when we surgically change patient gender. However, this is statistically indistinguishable from the flip rates induced by simply paraphrasing inputs (14.1%). In this case, it would therefore be unwarranted to conclude that the LLM is especially sensitive to patient gender. To account for this and robustly measure the effects of targeted interventions, we propose a framework in which we compare (via statistical testing) differences observed under target interventions to those induced by paraphrasing inputs. We then use this framework to revisit a analysis done on the MedPerturb dataset, which reported evidence of model sensitivity to patient demographics and stylistic cues. We find that these effects largely dissipate when we account for general model sensitivity, with only 5 of 120 tests reaching statistical significance. Applying the same framework to occupational biography classification, we detect clearly significant directional gender bias, showing that the framework identifies real directional effects even when they are small. We evaluate a range of metrics (aggregate, per-sample distributional, and regression) and find that per-sample metrics are dramatically more powerful than aggregate metrics and regression powerfully and uniquely characterizes effect direction and magnitude.

因果提示模型偏见评估方法公平性

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