Addressing Stereotypes in Large Language Models: A Critical Examination and Mitigation

Abstract: LLMs, such as ChatGPT, have gained popularity in recent years with the advancement of NLP, with use cases spanning many disciplines and daily lives as well. LLMs inherit explicit and implicit biases from the datasets they were trained on; these biases can include social, ethical, cultural, religious, and other prejudices and stereotypes. It is important to comprehensively examine such shortcomings by identifying the existence and extent of such biases, recognizing the origin, and attempting to mitigate such biased outputs to ensure fair outputs to reduce harmful stereotypes and misinformation. This study inspects and highlights the need to address biases in LLMs amid growing generative AI. We utilize bias-specific benchmarks such StereoSet and CrowSPairs to evaluate the existence of various biases in many different generative models such as BERT, GPT 3.5, and ADA. To detect both explicit and implicit biases, we adopt a three-pronged approach for thorough and inclusive analysis. Results indicate fine-tuned models struggle with gender biases but excel at identifying and avoiding racial biases. Our findings also illustrated that despite some cases of success, LLMs often over-rely on keywords in prompts and its outputs. This demonstrates the incapability of LLMs to attempt to truly understand the accuracy and authenticity of its outputs. Finally, in an attempt to bolster model performance, we applied an enhancement learning strategy involving fine-tuning, models using different prompting techniques, and data augmentation of the bias benchmarks. We found fine-tuned models to exhibit promising adaptability during cross-dataset testing and significantly enhanced performance on implicit bias benchmarks, with performance gains of up to 20%.