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Biased associations have been a challenge in the development of classifiers for detecting toxic language, hindering both fairness and accuracy. As potential solutions, we investigate recently introduced debiasing methods for text classification datasets and models, as applied to toxic language detection. Our focus is on lexical (e.g., swear words, slurs, identity mentions) and dialectal markers (specifically African American English). Our comprehensive experiments establish that existing methods are limited in their ability to prevent biased behavior in current toxicity detectors. We then propose an automatic, dialect-aware data correction method, as a proof-of-concept. Despite the use of synthetic labels, this method reduces dialectal associations with toxicity. Overall, our findings show that debiasing a model trained on biased toxic language data is not as effective as simply relabeling the data to remove existing biases.
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This content will become publicly available on December 14, 2025
Debiasing Global Workspace: A Cognitive Neural Framework for Learning Debiased and Interpretable Representations
When trained on biased datasets, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) often make predictions based on attributes derived from features spuriously correlated with the target labels. This is especially problematic if these irrelevant features are easier for the model to learn than the truly relevant ones. Many existing approaches, called debiasing methods, have been proposed to address this issue, but they often require predefined bias labels and entail significantly increased computational complexity by incorporating extra auxiliary models. Instead, we provide an orthogonal perspective from the existing approaches, inspired by cognitive science, specifically Global Workspace Theory (GWT). Our method, Debiasing Global Workspace (DGW), is a novel debiasing framework that consists of specialized modules and a shared workspace, allowing for increased modularity and improved debiasing performance. Additionally, DGW enhances the transparency of decision-making processes by visualizing which features of the inputs the model focuses on during training and inference through attention masks. We begin by proposing an instantiation of GWT for the debiasing method. We then outline the implementation of each component within DGW. At the end, we validate our method across various biased datasets, proving its effectiveness in mitigating biases and improving model performance.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2223839
- PAR ID:
- 10629929
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of Machine Learning Research
- Date Published:
- Volume:
- 285
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 85–99
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Vancouver, Canada
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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