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Title: Breaking Bias, Building Bridges: Evaluation and Mitigation of Social Biases in LLMs via Contact Hypothesis
Large Language Models (LLMs) perpetuate social biases, reflecting prejudices in their training data and reinforcing societal stereotypes and inequalities. Our work explores the potential of the Contact Hypothesis, a concept from social psychology for debiasing LLMs. We simulate various forms of social contact through LLM prompting to measure their influence on the model’s biases, mirroring how intergroup interactions can reduce prejudices in social contexts. We create a dataset of 108,000 prompts following a principled approach replicating social contact to measure biases in three LLMs (LLaMA 2, Tulu, and NousHermes) across 13 social bias dimensions. We propose a unique debiasing technique, Social Contact Debiasing (SCD), that instruction-tunes these models with unbiased responses to prompts. Our research demonstrates that LLM responses exhibit social biases when subject to contact probing, but more importantly, these biases can be significantly reduced by up to 40% in 1 epoch of instruction tuning LLaMA 2 following our SCD strategy.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2327143
PAR ID:
10561630
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
Volume:
7
ISSN:
3065-8365
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1180 to 1189
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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