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ACL Findings2024

Debiasing Large Language Models with Structured Knowledge

Congda Ma, Tianyu Zhao, Manabu Okumura

Abstract

Due to biases inherently present in data for pretraining, current pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) also ubiquitously manifest the same phenomena. Since the bias influences the output from the LLMs across various tasks, the widespread deployment of the LLMs is hampered. We propose a simple method that utilizes structured knowledge to alleviate this issue, aiming to reduce the bias embedded within the LLMs and ensuring they have an encompassing perspective when used in applications. Experimental results indicated that our method has good debiasing ability when applied to existing both autoregressive and masked language models. Additionally, it could ensure that the performances of LLMs on downstream tasks remain uncompromised. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines in the debiasing ability. Importantly, our method obviates the need for training from scratch, thus offering enhanced scalability and costeffectiveness. 1

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Cited by top-tier papers2

  1. Guiding LLM Decision-Making with Fairness Reward ModelsZara Hall, Melanie Subbiah, Thomas P. Zollo, Kathleen McKeown et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 14 citations
  2. KLAAD: Refining Attention Mechanisms to Reduce Societal Bias in Generative Language ModelsSeorin Kim, Dongyoung Lee, Jaejin LeeEMNLP 2025

Builds on7

  1. Bias Out-of-the-Box: An Empirical Analysis of Intersectional Occupational Biases in Popular Generative Language ModelsHannah Rose Kirk, Yennie Jun, Filippo Volpin, Haider Iqbal et al.NeurIPS 2021 · 243 citations
  2. On Measuring and Mitigating Biased Inferences of Word EmbeddingsSunipa Dev, Tao Li, Jeff M. Phillips, Vivek SrikumarAAAI 2020 · 195 citations
  3. Towards Debiasing Sentence RepresentationsPaul Pu Liang, Irene Mengze Li, Emily Zheng, Yao Chong Lim et al.ACL 2020 · 149 citations
  4. On Second Thought, Let's Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot ReasoningOmar Shaikh, Hongxin Zhang, William Barr Held, Michael S. Bernstein et al.ACL 2023 · 61 citations
  5. CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language ModelsNikita Nangia, Clara Vania, Rasika Bhalerao, Samuel R. BowmanEMNLP 2020 · 19 citations

Related papers

  1. Knowing Bias, Doing Better: Mitigating Social Bias in LLMs via Know-Bias Neuron EnhancementJinhao Pan, Chahat Raj, Anjishnu Mukherjee, Sina Mansouri et al.ICML 2026
  2. Self-Supervised Position Debiasing for Large Language ModelsZhongkun Liu, Zheng Chen, Mengqi Zhang, Zhaochun Ren et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 4 citations
  3. Towards Debiasing NLU Models from Unknown BiasesPrasetya Ajie Utama, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Iryna GurevychEMNLP 2020 · 3 citations
  4. Causal-Guided Active Learning for Debiasing Large Language ModelsZhouhao Sun, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yixuan Ma et al.ACL 2024
  5. Gender-tuning: Empowering Fine-tuning for Debiasing Pre-trained Language ModelsSomayeh Ghanbarzadeh, Yan Huang, Hamid Palangi, Radames Cruz Moreno et al.ACL Findings 2023 · 17 citations
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