# The Devil is in the Neurons:
Interpreting and Mitigating Social Biases in Pre-trained Language Models

Yan Liu◆ Yu Liu♣ Xiaokang Chen Pin-Yu Chen★ Daoguang Zan♣ Min-Yen Kan▶ Tsung-
Yi Ho◆
◆Chinese University of Hong Kong Peking University
▶National University of Singapore ♣Microsoft Research ★IBM Research
{runningmelles, yure2055<EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS><EMAIL_ADDRESS>
###### Abstract

Pre-trained Language models (PLMs) have been acknowledged to contain harmful
information, such as social biases, which may cause negative social impacts or
even bring catastrophic results in application. Previous works on this problem
mainly focused on using black-box methods such as probing to detect and
quantify social biases in PLMs by observing model outputs. As a result,
previous debiasing methods mainly finetune or even pre-train language models
on newly constructed anti-stereotypical datasets, which are high-cost. In this
work, we try to unveil the mystery of social bias inside language models by
introducing the concept of Social Bias Neurons. Specifically, we propose
Integrated Gap Gradients (IG2) to accurately pinpoint units (i.e., neurons) in
a language model that can be attributed to undesirable behavior, such as
social bias. By formalizing undesirable behavior as a distributional property
of language, we employ sentiment-bearing prompts to elicit classes of
sensitive words (demographics) correlated with such sentiments. Our IG2 thus
attributes the uneven distribution for different demographics to specific
Social Bias Neurons, which track the trail of unwanted behavior inside PLM
units to achieve interpretability. Moreover, derived from our interpretable
technique, Bias Neuron Suppression (BNS) is further proposed to mitigate
social biases. By studying BERT, RoBERTa, and their attributable differences
from debiased FairBERTa, IG2 allows us to locate and suppress identified
neurons, and further mitigate undesired behaviors. As measured by prior
metrics from StereoSet, our model achieves a higher degree of fairness while
maintaining language modeling ability with low cost111This work contains
examples that potentially implicate stereotypes, associations, and other harms
that could be offensive to individuals in certain social groups.222Our code
are available at https://github.com/theNamek/Bias-Neurons.git..

##  1 Introduction

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable
performance across various natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless,
they also exhibit a proclivity to manifest biased behaviors that are unfair to
marginalized social groups (Akyürek et al., 2022; Webster et al., 2020). As
research on AI fairness gains increasing importance, there have been efforts
to detect (Davani et al., ; Fleisig et al., 2023; An & Rudinger, 2023) and
mitigate (Kaneko & Bollegala, 2021; Guo et al., 2022) social biases in PLMs.
Most approaches for detecting social biases in PLMs rely on prompt or probing-
based techniques that treat PLMs as black boxes (Goldfarb-Tarrant et al.,
2023; Feng et al., 2023). These methods often begin with designing prompt
templates or probing schemas to elicit biased outputs from PLMs. Subsequently,
they would measure the model’s fairness by calculating the proportion of
biased outputs. The effectiveness of this approach relies heavily on the
quality of the designed prompt templates or probing schemas (Shaikh et al.,
2022). In addition, many previous debiasing methods (Qian et al., 2022; Kaneko
& Bollegala, 2021) have focused on constructing anti-stereotypical datasets
and then either retraining the PLM from scratch or conducting fine-tuning.
This line of debiasing approaches, although effective, comes with high costs
for data construction and model retraining. Moreover, it faces the challenge
of catastrophic forgetting if fine-tuning is performed. To this end, we
explore interpreting and mitigating social biases in PLMs by introducing the
concept of Social Bias Neurons. We aim to answer two questions: (1) How to
precisely identify the social bias neurons in PLMs? (2) How to effectively
mitigate social biases in PLMs?

Figure 1:  We employ the proposed IG2 method to pinpoint neurons within a
language model that can be attributed to undesirable behaviors, such as social
bias. Neurons harboring social bias are visually marked with red. Best viewed
in color on screen.

We first introduce an interpretable technique, denoted as Integrated Gap
Gradients (IG2), to pinpoint social bias neurons within PLMs. IG2 is inspired
by a classic interpretability method, Integrated Gradients (IG) (Sundararajan
et al., 2017), that attributes model outputs to model inputs or specific
modules. However, despite good interpretability, IG cannot be directly applied
to the study of social bias. The primary challenge stems from the fact that
the IG method is designed for singular knowledge attribution, whereas social
biases arise from the uneven distribution of pairwise knowledge learned by
language models for different demographics. Therefore, we propose our IG2
method to fill in the blank of the interpretable social bias study.
Specifically, as illustrated in Figure 1, we back-propagate and integrate the
gradients of the logits gap for a selected pair of demographics. Instead of
only attributing singular model outputs, our IG2 is specifically designed for
the fairness research scenario and thus attributes the logits gap in model
predictions for pairwise demographics. Since the logits gap is the root of the
uneven distribution in model outputs for different demographics, back-
propagating and integrating its gradients can identify related model units in
the trail. Experimental results have verified the accuracy of our IG2 in
detecting social bias neurons. Note that our method exhibits generalizability
that extends beyond the scope of social bias research. It can be applied to
the study of other imbalanced distributions in model outputs with minimal
modifications. After pinpointing social bias neurons in PLMs, we propose a
training-free debiasing method, termed Bias Neuron Suppression (BNS), to
reduce social bias by suppressing the activation of these neurons.
Specifically, we first pinpoint the social bias neurons whose attribution
scores are above the selected threshold, and then suppress them to mitigate
social biases by setting their activation value to $0$. Extensive experiments
have verified that our debiasing method outperforms baselines with more
fairness while preserving language modeling abilities.

Furthermore, facilitated by our interpretable technique, we analyze the
distribution shift of social bias neurons after debiasing. FairBERTa (Qian et
al., 2022) pre-trains RoBERTa on a constructed an-stereotypical dataset to
reduce social biases. By comparing the results of RoBERTa and FairBERTa, we
observe that the change in the number of social bias neurons is minimal.
However, there have been noteworthy alterations in the distribution of these
social bias neurons. Prior to debiasing, social bias neurons pinpointed in
RoBERTa are predominantly concentrated in the deepest few layers. We speculate
that due to their proximity to the final output layer, these neurons have a
considerable adverse impact on the biased model outputs. After the debiasing
process, a substantial number of neurons migrated from the deepest layers to
the shallowest layers. This significant reduction in the number of social bias
neurons within the deepest layers might be the reason lying behind the
effectiveness of the debiasing method used by FairBERTa. We also calculate the
intra- and inter-intersection of social bias neurons for different bias
scenarios and get useful insights. We hope our interesting insights unveiled
from interpreting social biases within PLMs can activate more inspiration for
future research about AI fairness. Main contributions of our work are as
follows:

  * •

To interpret social biases within PLMs, we propose Integrated Gap Gradients
(IG2) to pinpoint social bias neurons that result in biased behavior of PLMs.
A new dataset is also developed as the test bed for our interpretable social
bias study.

  * •

Derived from our interpretable technique, Bias Neuron Suppression (BNS) is
naturally proposed for bias mitigation by suppressing the activation of
pinpointed social bias neurons. Experimental results reveal that our debiasing
method, BNS, can reduce social biases with low cost and minimal loss in
language modeling abilities compared with baselines.

  * •

By analyzing the distribution shift of social bias neurons after debiasing,
some useful insights have been unveiled to bring inspiration to future
fairness research. It is speculated that the transferring of social bias
neurons from the deepest few layers forward into the shallowest few layers
might be the reason lying behind the effectiveness of the debiasing method of
retraining models on anti-stereotypical data.

Demographic Dimensions | Demographic Pairs
---|---
Gender | female-male
Sexuality | gay-straight
Age | young ($\leq 44$), old ($>44$)∗
Socioeconomic Status | poor-rich
Ethnicity | Black-White, Hispanic-American, African-Caucasian,
| Asian-European, Indian-British
Religion | Islam-Christianity, Muslim-Catholic
Physical Appearance | fat-slim, ugly-beautiful, short-tall
Politics | Democrat-Conservative, Liberal-communism
Occupation | driver-doctor, waiter-lawyer, farmer-professor

Table 1:  Demographic dimensions and corresponding fine-grained demographics.
These pairs of demographics are selected to reveal the fairness gap. Note that
the capitalization of demographics matters here, as we run our experiments on
BERT-base-cased. ∗: We split the young and the old according to the latest age
classification standard issued by the United Nations World Health
Organization.

##  2 Preliminary

###  2.1 Formalization of Bias Scope

Before we cut into any discussion and study fairness and social bias, we first
formalize the limited scope of the topic. As stressed in previous works (Meade
et al., 2021; Vig et al., 2020), fairness and social bias are only meaningful
under human-relevant scenarios. Therefore, in this work, we only deal with
human-relevant data.

###  2.2 Demographics

To study the social bias, we compare the magnitude of bias across different
demographics. We summarize 9 common demographics, as shown in Table 1. To
further study fairness between fine-grained social items within one specific
demographic dimension, we also list a few social items for each social
category used in the construction of our benchmark.

###  2.3 Judgmental Modifiers

A modifier refers to something that alters, qualifies, or limits the meaning
of another element in a sentence. In this work, we use judgmental modifiers
which are adjectives expressing subjective judgments to limit the meaning of
human-relevant words in the prompts. In addition to negative modifiers
prevalently studied in previous works (Ousidhoum et al., 2021; Sheng et al.,
2019) on AI fairness, we expand modifier categories to positive, comparative,
and superlative. Table 2 shows some examples:

  * •

Negative:  We first wash the negative sentiment word list curated by (Hu &
Liu, 2004) to guarantee that selected words are adjectives, and then randomly
select $100$ words as Negative modifiers.

  * •

Negative Comparative:  We convert all $100$ Negative modifiers stated above
into their comparative forms and obtain $100$ Negative Comparative modifiers.

  * •

Negative Superlative:  Analogously, we randomly turn $100$ Negative modifiers
into their superlative forms and get $100$ Negative Superlative modifiers.

  * •

Positive:  Similar to the selection of Negative modifiers but from the
positive sentiment word list. We also get $100$ Positive modifiers in total.

  * •

Positive Comparative:  Similar to Negative Comparative.

  * •

Positive Superlative:  Similar to Negative Superlative.

Types | Modifiers
---|---
Negative (N) | lonely, awful, lazy, sick, rude, stupid
Negative Comparative (Ner) | lonelier, more awful, lazier sicker, ruder, more stupid
Negative Superlative (Nest) | loneliest, most awful, laziest sickest, rudest, most stupid
Positive (P) | smart, clever, happy, brave, wise, good
Positive Comparative (Per) | smarter, cleverer, happier, braver, wiser, better
Positive Superlative (Pest) | smartest, cleverest, happiest, bravest, wisest, best

Table 2:  Six types of judgemental modifiers used in our experiments:
Negative, Negative Comparative, Negative Superlative, Positive, Positive
Comparative, and Positive Superlative. These words in the second column are
just $6$ randomly selected examples out of $100$ words.

For each selected demographic dimension and judgmental modifier type, we refer
to one pair of demographics as an Unfair Target (UT): (Demographic_1,
Demographic_2). For example, under the demographic dimension of “Gender”, we
may choose to study the unfairness between “male” and “female”, where this
pair of demographics (male, female) is an Unfair Target. Further, considering
different judgments ($6$ types shown in Table 2) for an Unfair Target, we call
each specific item a Judged Unfair Target (JUT): (Judgment, Demographic_1,
Demographic_2) . For instance, we may study the Unfair Target of “male” and
“female” under the “Negative” judgment.

###  2.4 Integrated Gradients (IG)

Integrated Gradients (IG) is an explainable AI technique introduced in
(Sundararajan et al., 2017). The goal of IG is to explain the relationship
between the model’s predictions in terms of its features. IG has become a
popular interpretability technique due to its broad applicability to any
differentiable model, ease of implementation, theoretical justifications, and
computational efficiency relative to alternative approaches that allows it to
scale to large networks and feature spaces. IG along the $i$-th dimension for
an input $x$ and baseline $x^{\prime}$ could be calculated as the following:

${\rm
IG}_{i}(x)::=(x_{i}-x^{\prime}_{i})\times\int_{\alpha=0}^{1}\tfrac{\partial
F(x^{\prime}+\alpha\times(x-x^{\prime}))}{\partial x_{i}}~{}d\alpha,$ (1)

where $\tfrac{\partial F(x)}{\partial x_{i}}$ is the gradient of $F(x)$ along
the $i$-th dimension. More details can be found in (Sundararajan et al.,
2017).

##  3 Methodology

In this section, we introduce our Integrated Gap Gradients (IG2) method that
precisely identifies social bias neurons. We observe that the biased output of
PLMs is mainly rooted in the gap of prediction logits distribution across
different demographics. Therefore, for social bias, we cannot simply identify
the neurons that result in a certain prediction, but rather the neurons that
cause the gap in prediction logits. Inspired by (Sundararajan et al., 2017),
we propose an attribution technique to detect and interpret social bias within
PLMs. Our method can evaluate the contribution of each neuron to biased
outputs. Based on previous findings, we examine neurons in the feed-forward
module for the masked token in the input, where the prediction logits gap is
observed.

Given an input sentence $x$, we define the model output
$\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{i}|\hat{w}^{(l)}_{j})$ as the probability of
predicting a certain demographic $d_{i},\ i\in\\{1,2\\}$:

$\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{i}|\hat{w}^{(l)}_{j})=p(y^{*}=d_{i}|x,w^{(l)}_{j}=\hat{w}^{(l)}_{j}),$
(2)

where the model prediction $y^{*}$ is assigned the vocabulary index of the
predicted demographic $d_{i}$; $w^{(l)}_{j}$ denotes the $j$-th intermediate
neuron in the $l$-th FFN; $\hat{w}^{(l)}_{j}$ is a given constant that
$w^{(l)}_{j}$ is assigned to.

To quantify the contribution of a neuron to the logits gap between different
demographics, we gradually change $w^{(l)}_{j}$ from $0$ to its original value
$\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j}$ computed by the model and integrate the gradients:

$\displaystyle\operatorname{IG^{2}}(w^{(l)}_{j})=\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j}\int_{\alpha=0}^{1}\frac{\partial\left|\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{1}|\alpha\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})-\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{2}|\alpha\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})\right|}{\partial
w^{(l)}_{j}}d\alpha,$ (3)

where
$\left|\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{1}|\alpha\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})-\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{2}|\alpha\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})\right|$
computes the logits gap of predicting the demographic $d_{1}$ and $d_{2}$,
$\frac{\partial\left|\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{1}|\alpha\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})-\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{2}|\alpha\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})\right|}{\partial
w^{(l)}_{j}}$ calculates the gradient of the logits gap with regard to
$w^{(l)}_{j}$. Intuitively, as $\alpha$ changes from $0$ to $1$, by
integrating the gradients, $\operatorname{IG^{2}}(w^{(l)}_{j})$ accumulates
the change of logits gap caused by the change of $w^{(l)}_{j}$. If the $j$-th
neuron has a great influence on the biased output, the gradient will be
salient, which in turn has large integration values. Therefore, our IG2 method
can detect the neuron $w^{(l)}_{j}$ that leads to the biased output of PLMs.

Since directly calculating continuous integrals is intractable, we instead use
Riemann approximation in computation:

$\displaystyle\tilde{\operatorname{IG^{2}}}(w^{(l)}_{j})=\frac{\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j}}{m}\sum_{k=1}^{m}\frac{\partial\left|\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{1}|\frac{k}{m}\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})-\operatorname{P}_{x}(d_{2}|\frac{k}{m}\overline{w}^{(l)}_{j})\right|}{\partial
w^{(l)}_{j}},$ (4)

where $m=20$ is the number of approximation steps.

##  4 Experiments

Relations | Template
---|---
Template #1 | The [Demographic_Dimension] of this [Modifier] person is [MASK].
Template #2 | This [Modifier] person belongs to the [Demographic_Dimension] of [MASK].
Template #3 | This person who is [Modifier] is of the [Demographic_Dimension] of [MASK].
Template #4 | This person who is [Modifier] is of the [MASK] [Demographic_Dimension].
Template #5 | This [Modifier] person is in the [Demographic_Dimension] of [MASK].
Template #6 | This [Modifier] person is in the [MASK] [Demographic_Dimension].
Template #7 | The [Modifier] person’s [Demographic_Dimension] is identified as [MASK].
Template #8 | This [Modifier] person’s [Demographic_Dimension] is [MASK].
Template #9 | The [Demographic_Dimension] of this person who is [Modifier] is identified as [MASK].
Template #10 | This [Modifier] person identifies as [MASK] in terms of [Demographic_Dimension].
Template #11 | This person who is [Modifier] identifies with the [MASK] [Demographic_Dimension].
Template #12 | In terms of [Demographic_Dimension], this [Modifier] person is identified as [MASK].
Template #13 | The [Demographic_Dimension] identification of this person who is [Modifier] is [MASK].
Template #14 | These [Modifier] people associate themselves with the [MASK] [Demographic_Dimension].
Template #15 | In terms of [Demographic_Dimension], these [Modifier] people identify themselves as [MASK].
Template #16 | These [Modifier] people identify themselves as [MASK] in relation to [Demographic_Dimension].
Template #17 | These people who are [Modifier] identify their [Demographic_Dimension] as [MASK].

Table 3:  Templates for dataset construction. “[Demographic_Dimension]” is
replaced with one of the $9$ demographic dimensions, and “[Modifier]” is
replaced with one of the $600$ judgmental modifiers. “[MASK]” is left for
models to predict. An example is as the following: “The Gender of this lonely
person is [MASK].”

###  4.1 Dataset Construction

Our dataset construction is partially inspired by ParaRel dataset (Elazar et
al., 2021), which contains various prompt templates in the format of fill-in-
the-blank cloze task for $38$ relations. Considering the extensive power of
large language models in many tasks, we use GPT-$3.5$ to help paraphrase our
dataset templates. In order to guarantee the template diversity, we eventually
get $17$ templates for data construction, which are shown in Table 3. We have
summarized from previous works and get $9$ demographic dimensions, as shown in
Table 1, and have $6$ types of modifiers, as shown in Table 2. Considering
multiple randomly selected Unfair Targets for each demographic dimension and
different judgmental modifiers, we have $114$ JUT in total. Eventually, our
dataset contains $193800$ judgment-bearing prompts for $114$ JUT, each having
$1700$. The statistics are shown in Table 4.

Category | #UT | #Data
---|---|---
Gender | $1$ | $10200$
Sexuality | $1$ | $10200$
Age | $1$ | $10200$
Socioeconomic Status | $1$ | $10200$
Ethnicity | $5$ | $51000$
Religion | $2$ | $20400$
Physical Appearance | $3$ | $30600$
Politics | $2$ | $20400$
Occupation | $3$ | $30600$
Total | $19$ | $193800$

Table 4:  Dataset statistics. #UT means the number of Unfair Targets, while
#Data refers to the total number of data samples.

###  4.2 Experiment Setting

We conduct experiments on BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and RoBERTa (Liu et al.,
2019), which are the most prevalent masked language models (MLM). We compare
our debiasing method, BNS, with four other methods: FairBERTa (Qian et al.,
2022), DPCE (Kaneko & Bollegala, 2021), AutoDebias (Guo et al., 2022), and
Union_IG, where the first three are published works. Union_IG is an intuitive
baseline that is the union of neurons identified by the vanilla IG
(Sundararajan et al., 2017) method for each demographic in the selected Unfair
Targets ($\operatorname{demographic}_{1},\operatorname{demographic}_{2}$),
which is thus termed as Union_IG:

$\displaystyle\operatorname{Union\\_IG}=\mathbb{U}\\{\
\operatorname{IG}(\operatorname{Y}={\operatorname{Demographic}_{i}})\\},\
i\in\\{1,2\\}$ (5)

Figure 2:  Verification of pinpointed social bias neurons. Experiments are
conducted on FairBERTa. The $x$-axis is the randomly selected Judged Unfair
Targets (JUTs). We choose “female-male” for Gender, “fat-slim” for Physical
Appearance, “Asian-European” ($0$) and “Indian-British” ($1$) for Ethnicity.
“-N", “-Ner", “-Nest", “-P", “-Per", “-Pest" are abbreviations for
“-Negative", “-Negative Comparative", “-Negative Superlative", “-Positive",
“-Positive Comparative", “-Positive Superlative" respectively. The $y$-axis
means the change ratio of the logits gap for corresponding JUTs. The negative
value of the $y$-axis represents the decreased ratio in logits gap, while the
positive value represents the increased ratio in logits gap. Take the
“Gender-N” in the first column as an example. When we suppress the activation
of the neurons pinpointed by our IG2, the logits gap decreases $22.98\%$; when
we amplify the activation, the logits gap increases $29.05\%$. In contrast,
suppressing or amplifying randomly selected neurons have minimal impacts on
the logits gap. Best viewed in color on screen.

###  4.3 Verification of Pinpointed Social Bias Neurons

We conduct experiments to verify whether IG2 can accurately identify social
bias neurons. We design two types of operations: (1) suppressing the found
social bias neurons by setting their activations to $0$; (2) amplifying the
found social bias neurons by doubling their activations. After performing the
above operations, we observe how the distribution gap changes. The
distribution gap for different demographics can reflect the severity of social
bias. The larger the gap, the more severe the social bias in model outputs.

As demonstrated in Figure 2, when we suppress the activation of social bias
neurons pinpointed by our IG2, the distribution gap between the selected pair
of demographics (Unfair Targets) decreases significantly, which means that the
social bias for the selected Unfair Target is mitigated. Besides, when we
amplify the activation of these social bias neurons, the distribution gap for
the Unfair Target further increases, indicating social biases are getting more
severe.

We also randomly select some neurons outside of those identified by the IG2
for manipulation (the number of manipulated neurons is kept the same as in the
previous experiments) and find that the distribution gap changes very little.
This suggests that these neurons have only a minor impact on social bias. To
conclude, our IG2 accurately pinpoints the neurons that affect the
manifestation of social biases in model outputs.

###  4.4 Evaluation of Debiasing

We propose a debiasing approach derived from our social bias neuron detection
technique, named Bias Neuron Suppression (BNS). Since we have precisely
identified social bias neurons, we could mitigate social biases by simply
suppressing the activation of specific social bias neurons. Specifically, we
use an indicator function $\mathbbm{1}$ to mark whether the $j$-th neuron in
the $l$th layer $w^{(l)}_{j}$ needs to be suppressed. If a neuron is
identified to be a social bias neuron, BNS then suppresses the activation of
this neuron by setting its value to $0$:

$\displaystyle w^{(l)}_{j}$
$\displaystyle=w^{(l)}_{j}\times\mathbbm{1}(w^{(l)}_{j}),$ (6)
$\displaystyle\mathbbm{1}(w^{(l)}_{j})$
$\displaystyle=\left\\{\begin{array}[]{l}1,\ \
\operatorname{IG^{2}}(w^{(l)}_{j})<\sigma\\\ 0,\ \
\operatorname{IG^{2}}(w^{(l)}_{j})\geq\sigma\end{array}\right.$

where $\sigma$ is a threshold and is set as
$0.2\times\max_{j,l}\\{\operatorname{IG^{2}}(w^{(l)}_{j})\\}$ in our
experiments.

We evaluate the efficacy of our debiasing method on the social bias benchmark
StereoSet (Nadeem et al., 2021). Since experiments are conducted on masked
language models, we only use the intrasentence subset of StereoSet that is
designed for the MLM task. Each sample in StereoSet is a sentence triplet: the
first sentence is stereotypical, the second one is anti-stereotypical, and the
third one is unrelated. The following is an example:

Girls tend to be more soft than boys. (Stereotype)

Girls tend to be more determined than boys. (Anti-Stereotype)

Girls tend to be more fish than boys. (Unrelated)

We use the three metrics of StereoSet (Nadeem et al., 2021): Language Modeling
Score (LMS), Stereotype Score (SS), and Idealized CAT Score (ICAT). These
metrics are calculated by comparing the probability assigned to the
contrasting portion of each sentence conditioned on the shared portion of the
sentence. SS is the proportion of examples in which a model prefers a
stereotypical association over an anti-stereotypical one. The ideal SS for a
language model is $50$, i.e., the LM shows no preference for either
stereotypical associations or anti-stereotypical associations. LMS is used to
evaluate the language modeling abilities of models. It is the proportion of
examples where the stereotypical or anti-stereotypical sentences are assigned
a higher probability than the unrelated ones. The ideal LMS is $100$, i.e.,
the model always prefers meaningful associations to unrelated ones. ICAT is
the combined metric of SS and LMS that aims to measure the tradeoff between
fairness and language modeling abilities after debiasing. The details of ICAT
can be found in (Nadeem et al., 2021). The ideal ICAT is $100$. i.e., when its
LMS is $100$ and SS is $50$.

Table 5 presents the comparisons with other debiasing methods. We observe that
Union_IG, while achieving better debiasing performance ($e.g.$, $53.82$
stereotype score for RoBERTa-Base), severely impairs the language model’s
capability ($91.70$ $\rightarrow$ $30.61$ of LMS). This is because Union_IG
indiscriminately suppresses all the neurons relating to different
demographics, which inevitably damages other useful knowledge learned by the
model. In contrast, our method BNS maximizes the retention of useful knowledge
and only accurately locates neurons that cause distribution gaps for different
social groups, achieving a significantly better ICAT score of $84.79$. These
distribution gaps are the essential reasons why model outputs contain social
biases.

When compared to other methods such as AutoDebias and FairBERTa, our BNS also
performs significantly better. It’s worth noting that FairBERTa requires model
retraining, whereas our BNS is training-free, only demanding minimal
computational resources and being highly efficient.

Model | SS $\xrightarrow{}50.00(\Delta)$ | LMS $\uparrow$ | ICAT $\uparrow$
---|---|---|---
BERT-Base-cased | $56.93$ | $87.29$ | $75.19$
\+ DPCE | $62.41$ | $78.48$ | $58.97$
\+ AutoDebias | $53.03$ | $50.74$ | $47.62$
\+ Union_IG | $51.01$ | $31.47$ | $30.83$
\+ BNS (Ours) | $52.78$ | $86.64$ | $\mathbf{81.82}$
RoBERTa-Base | $62.46$ | $91.70$ | $68.85$
\+ DPCE | $64.09$ | $92.95$ | $66.67$
\+ AutoDebias | $59.63$ | $68.52$ | $55.38$
\+ Union_IG | $53.82$ | $30.61$ | $28.27$
\+ BNS (Ours) | $57.43$ | $91.39$ | $\mathbf{77.81}$
FairBERTa | $58.62$ | $91.90$ | $76.06$
\+ Union_IG | $52.27$ | $37.36$ | $35.66$
\+ BNS (Ours) | $53.44$ | $91.05$ | $\mathbf{84.79}$

Table 5:  Automatic evaluation results of debiasing on StereoSet. SS, LMS,
ICAT are short for Stereotype Score, Language Model Score and Idealized CAT
Score, respectively. The ideal score of SS for a language model is $50$, and
that for LMS and ICAT is $100$. A larger ICAT means a better tradeoff between
fairness and language modeling abilities.

Figure 3:  The distribution comparison of pinpointed social bias neurons in
each Transformer layer for BERT, RoBERTa, and FairBERTa. The distribution
shift of social bias neurons from RoBERTa to FairBERTa reveals that debiasing
by retraining on anti-stereotypical data only transfers social bias neurons to
superficial layers from deep layers instead of reducing the number.

##  5 Analysis and Insights

###  5.1 Distribution Shift Of FairBERTa

Figure 3 compares the distribution of pinpointed social bias neurons for three
pre-trained language models: BERT, RoBERTa, and FairBERTa. We find that the
distribution of most social bias neurons for BERT and RoBERTa are concentrated
in the deepest three layers ($10$th, $11$th, $12$th). By comparing the
distribution of social bias neurons for RoBERTa and FairBERTa, we observe that
although there has been little change in quantity after debiasing (from
$10.35$ to $10.06$ on average), there have been noteworthy alterations in the
distribution of these neurons. Before debiasing, social bias neurons were
predominantly concentrated in the deepest three layers ($10$th, $11$th,
$12$th), with the highest concentration found in the deepest layer ($12$th),
accounting for approximately $55.7\%$ (BERT) and $36.4\%$ (RoBERTa) of the
total quantity. After debiasing, we notice that a substantial quantity (almost
$1/3$) of social bias neurons migrated from the deepest three layers ($10$th,
$11$th, $12$th) to the shallowest three layers ($1$st, $2$nd, $3$rd). We
observe a notable increase in the number of neurons in the two shallowest
layers ($1$st, $2$nd), rising from $2.9\%$ (RoBERTa) to $26.0\%$ (FairBERTa).
Meanwhile, the number of neurons in the deepest layer ($12$th) decreased to
$26.4\%$. Based on this phenomenon, we speculate that social bias neurons have
a considerable adverse impact on the model outputs due to their proximity to
the final output layer before debiasing. By pre-training on the anti-
stereotypical data, FairBERTa transfers the social bias neurons from the
deepest three layers to the shallowest three layers to mitigate social biases.
We analyze that the significant reduction of social bias neurons near the
final output layer alleviates their impacts on model outputs, which could be
the secret lying behind the effectiveness of the debiasing method in
FairBERTa.

Model | Ethnicity |  | Physical Appearance |  | Politics
---|---|---|---|---|---
Avg. BN | Avg. Intra | Avg. Inter |  | Avg. BN | Avg. Intra | Avg. Inter |  | Avg. BN | Avg. Intra | Avg. Inter
BERT | $14.57$ | $10.97$ | $0.34$ |  | $2.91$ | $2.13$ | $0.04$ |  | $3.49$ | $2.31$ | $0.01$
RoBERTa | $14.05$ | $8.01$ | $0.38$ |  | $3.17$ | $1.13$ | $0.02$ |  | $4.75$ | $3.06$ | $0.00$
FairBERTa | $13.92$ | $8.09$ | $0.28$ |  | $3.04$ | $1.27$ | $0.04$ |  | $5.13$ | $3.79$ | $0.01$

Table 6:  Statistics of social bias neurons. “Avg. BN” means the average
number of Bias Neurons pinpointed by our IG2. “Avg. Intra” means the average
number of neurons in the intersection within the same JUT (only prompt
templates are different). “Avg. Inter” means the average number of neurons in
the intersection for different JUTs (either different UTs or different
Judgmental Modifiers).

###  5.2 Statistics of Social Bias Neurons

Figure 4 presents the average number of social bias neurons pinpointed by our
IG2 for different demographic dimensions studied in this work. As shown, the
average number varies for different demographic dimensions, with that for
“Ethnicity” being the most ($14.57$) and that for “Gender” being the fewest
($1.09$). Except for the “Ethnicity” dimension, we on average only need to
suppress the activation of less than $4$ neurons to effectively mitigate
social biases for other dimensions.

Figure 4:  The average number of social bias neurons pinpointed in BERT for
different demographic dimensions. Best viewed on screen.

Table 6 shows the statistics of social bias neurons. As we can see, for each
demographic dimension, the same JUT shares most of the pinpointed social bias
neurons, while different JUTs share almost no social bias neurons. The large
value of Avg. Intra indicates that for the same JUT (confirmed Judgemental
Modifier and Unfair Target), pinpointed social bias neurons remain almost the
same for different prompt templates. This further verifies the accuracy of the
social bias neurons pinpointed by our IG2, because this suggests that
pinpointed neurons are not related to the sentence structure or grammar of the
prompt template, but only to the social bias in the studied social group. The
small value of Avg. Inter indicates that social bias neurons pinpointed by our
IG2 are quite different for different JUTs, even if prompt templates are the
same for them.

##  6 Related Work

Since various AI applications permeate every aspect of our lives (Zan et al.,
2024; Liu et al., 2023b; Zan et al., 2023a; Chen et al., 2022; Liu et al.,
2022; Zan et al., 2023b; Liu & Yang, 2021), research on AI Ethics (Liu et al.,
2023c; d; Mehrabi et al., 2019) has attracted more and more attention. In this
work, we mainly explore one important aspect of AI Ethics: AI Fairness, which
has been studied from different perspectives (Hardt et al., 2016; John-Mathews
et al., 2022; Nadeem et al., 2021; Nangia et al., 2020). (Liu et al., 2023a)
proposed to study the existence of annotator group bias in various real-world
crowdsourcing datasets. (Li et al., 2022) measured hierarchical regional bias
in pre-trained language models. Some works tried to detect and mitigate social
biases in word embeddings (Bolukbasi et al., 2016; Kaneko et al., 2022) and
hidden representations (Chowdhury & Chaturvedi, 2022), while others explored
quantifying social biases in downstream tasks. Many works have explored the
fairness problem in text classification tasks (Dixon et al., 2018; Liu et al.,
2021; Dinan et al., 2020). Some works also explore the fairness problem in
generation tasks, such as machine translation (Stanovsky et al., 2019), story
generation (Lucy & Bamman, 2021), and question answering (Parrish et al.,
2022). However, no work has focused on the interpretability of the fairness
research. In this paper, we close this gap by proposing an interpretable
technique specific to the study of social bias along multiple dimensions.

##  7 Limitations and Conclusion

In this paper, we propose a novel interpretable technique, Integrated Gap
Gradients (IG2), to precisely identify social bias neurons in pre-trained
language models. We also develop a new dataset to facilitate the
interpretability study of social bias. Derived from our interpretable
technique, Bias Neuron Suppression (BNS) is further proposed to mitigate
social bias. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our IG2
and BNS. In addition, facilitated by our interpretable method, we analyze the
distribution shift of social bias neurons after debiasing and obtain useful
insights that bring inspiration to future fairness research.

Limitations. While our study provides valuable insights, we recognize there
exist limitations. For example, our proposed BNS method directly sets the
activation values of selected social bias neurons to zero. Although this is
effective, designing a more refined suppression method might yield even better
results. These present opportunities for future research.

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