Challenge: Pre-trained language models can encode unfair social biases from large pre-training corpora and even amplify biase in downstream applications.
Approach: They propose a *debias-while-prompt tuning* method for mitigating biases via counterfactual contrastive prompt tuning on downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method can mitigate biases on three extrinsic bias benchmarks and adapt to existing debiased language models.

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Prompt Tuning Pushes Farther, Contrastive Learning Pulls Closer: A Two-Stage Approach to Mitigate Social Biases (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing debiasing techniques use Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) to balance the training corpus, but this technique slightly modifies the original corpus limiting the representation distance between different demographic groups.
Approach: They propose a two-stage debiasing model using Contrastive learning with Continuous Prompt Augmentation to mitigate social biases in PLMs’ encoding.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines in terms of debiasing performance while maintaining the language modeling capability of PLMs.
An Empirical Analysis of Parameter-Efficient Methods for Debiasing Pre-Trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models inherit more human-like biases from the training corpora, causing computationally expensive problems.
Approach: They propose parameter-efficient methods in combination with counterfactual data augmentation for bias mitigation.
Outcome: The proposed methods are effective in mitigating gender bias, prompt tuning is more suitable for GPT-2 than BERT, and less effective when it comes to racial and religious bias.
Upstream Mitigation Is Not All You Need: Testing the Bias Transfer Hypothesis in Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models and other massively pre-trained "foundation" models can easily adapt to a wide variety of downstream tasks in a process called finetuning.
Approach: They propose to use the bias transfer hypothesis to reduce social biases internalized by large language models during pre-training into harmful task-specific behavior after fine-tuning.
Outcome: The bias transfer hypothesis is the theory that social biases internalized by large language models during pre-training transfer into harmful task-specific behavior after fine-tuning.
Auto-Debias: Debiasing Masked Language Models with Automated Biased Prompts (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to mitigate human-like biases in pretrained language models are based on external corpora and require a distribution alignment loss to mitigate them.
Approach: They propose an automatic method to mitigate biases in pretrained language models by searching for biased prompts such that cloze-style completions are the most different with respect to different demographic groups.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces biases in pretrained language models, including gender and racial bias, and improves fairness of the models.
Take Care of Your Prompt Bias! Investigating and Mitigating Prompt Bias in Factual Knowledge Extraction (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Recent research shows that pre-trained language models suffer from “prompt bias” in factual knowledge extraction.
Approach: They propose a representation-based approach to mitigate prompt bias during inference time by querying the model and removing it from its internal representations to generate debiased representations.
Outcome: The proposed approach corrects the overfitted performance caused by prompt bias and significantly improves prompt retrieval capability.
Mitigating Biases in Language Models via Bias Unlearning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent debiasing approaches target different demographic groups, harming fairness and discrimination.
Approach: They propose a model debiasing framework which targets stereotypes by unlearning stereotype forgetting and anti-stereotype retention.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in mitigating bias while retaining language modeling capabilities.
Mitigate Extrinsic Social Bias in Pre-trained Language Models via Continuous Prompts Adjustment (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods of extrinsic bias mitigation rely on manual word lists for sensitive groups . however, these word lists are limited by length and scope, resulting in poor performance.
Approach: They propose a method which generates continuous token lists from the entire vocabulary space and uses them to bridge the gap between outputs and targets in fairness learning process.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three NLU tasks.
Rethinking Prompt-based Debiasing in Large Language Model (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing prompt-based methods for debiasing are often superficial and lack a thorough understanding of complex bias concepts.
Approach: They analyze a BBQ and stereoSet benchmarks to examine the assumption that large language models understand biases.
Outcome: The proposed model misclassified 90% of unbiased content as biased despite high accuracy on BBQ dataset . the proposed model may have been flawed in previous attempts to debiase .
On Measuring Social Biases in Prompt-Based Multi-Task Learning (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: a large body of work within prompt engineering attempts to understand the effects of input forms and prompts in achieving superior performance.
Approach: They propose a large-scale text-to-text language model trained using prompts . they consider two different forms of semantically equivalent inputs - question-answer format and premise-hypothesis format .
Outcome: The proposed model can generalize into novel forms of language and handle novel tasks.
A Prompt Array Keeps the Bias Away: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Adversarial Learning (2022.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Large-scale, pretrained vision-language models are growing in popularity due to impressive performance on downstream tasks with minimal finetuning.
Approach: They propose to apply ranking metrics to image-text representations to investigate bias measures and debiasing methods to reduce various bias measures.
Outcome: The proposed model reduces bias measures with minimal degradation to image-text representations.

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