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.

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Co2PT: Mitigating Bias in Pre-trained Language Models through Counterfactual Contrastive Prompt Tuning (2023.findings-emnlp)

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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.
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.
End-to-End Bias Mitigation by Modelling Biases in Corpora (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that strong natural language understanding models are prone to relying on unwanted dataset biases without learning the underlying task.
Approach: They propose two learning strategies to train neural models that are more robust to dataset biases and transfer better to out-of-domain datasets.
Outcome: The proposed methods improve robustness in all settings and transfer better to out-of-domain datasets.
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.
Can Machine Unlearning Reduce Social Bias in Language Models? (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for mitigating bias in language models are expensive and time-consuming . comparative studies have not evaluated their respective advantages and disadvantages .
Approach: They propose to use Partitioned Contrastive Gradient Unlearning and Negation via Task Vector to reduce social biases in open-source language models.
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform PCGU and DPO in debiasing models . the proposed methods can be easily tuned to balance the trade-off between bias reduction and generation quality .
An Empirical Survey of the Effectiveness of Debiasing Techniques for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent work has shown pre-trained language models capture social biases from the large amounts of text they are trained on.
Approach: They propose to use Counterfactual Data Augmentation, Dropout, Iterative Nullspace Projection, Self-Debias, and SentenceDebia as bias mitigation techniques to quantify their effectiveness.
Outcome: The proposed techniques are Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA), Dropout, Iterative Nullspace Projection, Self-Debias, and SentenceDebia.
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.
Self-Debiasing Large Language Models: Zero-Shot Recognition and Reduction of Stereotypes (2025.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Large language models exhibit harmful social biases, but they are often difficult to train and modify.
Approach: They leverage the zero-shot capabilities of large language models to reduce stereotyping . they introduce a technique called zero- shot self-debiasing to reduce bias .
Outcome: The proposed technique reduces stereotyping across nine different social groups while relying on the LLM itself and a simple prompt.
Disentangling Biased Knowledge from Reasoning in Large Language Models via Machine Unlearning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to disentangle biased knowledge from reasoning are sub-optimal . entangled data makes curation difficult, leading to inclusion of sensitive, toxic data.
Approach: They propose a framework that selectively removes biased knowledge while preserving reasoning abilities.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves fairness accuracy by 14.7% and reasoning performance by 62.6% across multiple LLMs.
When and Why Does Bias Mitigation Work? (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Neural models exploit shallow surface features to perform language understanding tasks, rather than learning the deeper language understanding and reasoning skills that practitioners desire.
Approach: They propose to use model debiasing techniques to pressure models away from spurious features and to use them to learn useful representations instead.
Outcome: The proposed methods increase models' reliance on hidden biases instead of learning robust features that help them solve a task.

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