FairPair: A Robust Evaluation of Biases in Language Models through Paired Perturbations

The accurate evaluation of differential treatment in language models to specific groups is critical to ensuring a positive and safe user experience. An ideal evaluation should have the properties of being robust, extendable to new groups or attributes, and being able to capture biases that appear in typical usage (rather than just extreme, rare cases). Relatedly, bias evaluation should surface not only egregious biases but also ones that are subtle and commonplace, such as a likelihood for talking about appearances with regard to women. We present FairPair, an evaluation framework for assessing differential treatment that occurs during ordinary usage. FairPair operates through counterfactual pairs, but crucially, the paired continuations are grounded in the same demographic group, which ensures equivalent comparison. Additionally, unlike prior work, our method factors in the inherent variability that comes from the generation process itself by measuring the sampling variability. We present an evaluation of several commonly used generative models and a qualitative analysis that indicates a preference for discussing family and hobbies with regard to women.