T ask Model, Zero/Few-Shot Failure Mode Input Question CoT in Unbiased Context CoT in Biased Context "... I think the answer is but I'm curious to hear what you think." Model justifies incorrect answer due to ambiguity in task specification. If you follow these instructions, do you return to the starting point? We start at the origin (0, 0), facing the positive y-axis. So the best answer is: (A). 3 We start at the origin (0, 0), facing the positive y-axis. So the best answer is: (B). Q: Is the following sentence plausible? Kenta Maeda is a baseball pitcher. Throwing to first base is part of baseball. American League Championship Series is a real baseball series. Throwing to first base is part of baseball. So the best answer is: (B) implausible.

English is the second language.

Interpretability can be implemented as a means to understand decisions taken by (black box) models, such as machine translation (MT) or large language models (LLMs). Yet, research in this area has been limited in relation to a manifested problem in these models: gender bias. With this research, we aim to move away from simply measuring bias to exploring its origins. Working with gender-ambiguous natural source data, this study examines which context, in the form of input tokens in the source sentence, influences (or triggers) the translation model choice of a certain gender inflection in the target language. To analyse this, we use contrastive explanations and compute saliency attribution. We first address the challenge of a lacking scoring threshold and specifically examine different attribution levels of source words on the model gender decisions in the translation. We compare salient source words with human perceptions of gender and demonstrate a noticeable overlap between human perceptions and model attribution. Additionally, we provide a linguistic analysis of salient words. Our work showcases the relevance of understanding model translation decisions in terms of gender, how this compares to human decisions and that this information should be leveraged to mitigate gender bias.

A dangerous assumption that can be made from prior work on the bias transfer hypothesis (BTH) is that biases do not transfer from pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to adapted models. We invalidate this assumption by studying the BTH in causal models under prompt adaptations, as prompting is an extremely popular and accessible adaptation strategy used in real-world applications. In contrast to prior work, we find that biases can transfer through prompting and that popular prompt-based mitigation methods do not consistently prevent biases from transferring. Specifically, the correlation between intrinsic biases and those after prompt adaptation remain moderate to strong across demographics and tasks -- for example, gender (rho >= 0.94) in co-reference resolution, and age (rho >= 0.98) and religion (rho >= 0.69) in question answering. Further, we find that biases remain strongly correlated when varying few-shot composition parameters, such as sample size, stereotypical content, occupational distribution and representational balance (rho >= 0.90). We evaluate several prompt-based debiasing strategies and find that different approaches have distinct strengths, but none consistently reduce bias transfer across models, tasks or demographics. These results demonstrate that correcting bias, and potentially improving reasoning ability, in intrinsic models may prevent propagation of biases to downstream tasks.

We follow the same setup as in Rae et al.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

In [4], the authors present the DisCoCirc (Distributed Compositional Circuits) formalism for the English language, a grammar-based framework derived from the production rules that incorporates circuit-like representations in order to give a precise categorical theoretical structure to the language. In this paper, we extend this approach to develop a similar framework for Bengali and apply it to translation tasks between English and Bengali. A central focus of our work lies in reassessing the effectiveness of DisCoCirc in reducing language bureaucracy. Unlike the result suggested in [5], our findings indicate that although it works well for a large part of the language, it still faces limitations due to the structural variation of the two languages. We discuss the possible methods that might handle these shortcomings and show that, in practice, DisCoCirc still struggles even with relatively simple sentences. This divergence from prior claims not only highlights the framework's constraints in translation but also suggest scope for future improvement. Apart from our primary focus on English-Bengali translation, we also take a short detour to examine English conjunctions, following [1], showing a connection between conjunctions and Boolean logic.

The predictive uncertainty of machine translation (MT) models is typically used as a quality estimation proxy. In this work, we posit that apart from confidently translating when a single correct translation exists, models should also maintain uncertainty when the input is ambiguous. We use uncertainty to measure gender bias in MT systems. When the source sentence includes a lexeme whose gender is not overtly marked, but whose target-language equivalent requires gender specification, the model must infer the appropriate gender from the context and can be susceptible to biases. Prior work measured bias via gender accuracy, however it cannot be applied to ambiguous cases. Using semantic uncertainty, we are able to assess bias when translating both ambiguous and unambiguous source sentences, and find that high translation accuracy does not correlate with exhibiting uncertainty appropriately, and that debiasing affects the two cases differently.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are intended to reflect human linguistic competencies. But humans have access to a broad and embodied context, which is key in detecting and resolving linguistic ambiguities, even in isolated text spans. A foundational case of semantic ambiguity is found in the task of coreference resolution: how is a pronoun related to an earlier person mention? This capability is implicit in nearly every downstream task, and the presence of ambiguity at this level can alter performance significantly. We show that LLMs can achieve good performance with minimal prompting in both coreference disambiguation and the detection of ambiguity in coreference, however, they cannot do both at the same time. We present the CORRECT-DETECT trade-off: though models have both capabilities and deploy them implicitly, successful performance balancing these two abilities remains elusive.