Null It Out: Guarding Protected Attributes by Iterative Nullspace Projection

Shauli Ravfogel, Yanai Elazar, Hila Gonen, Michael Twiton, Yoav Goldberg

Abstract Paper Share

Machine Learning for NLP Long Paper

Session 12B: Jul 8 (09:00-10:00 GMT)
Session 13A: Jul 8 (12:00-13:00 GMT)
Abstract: The ability to control for the kinds of information encoded in neural representation has a variety of use cases, especially in light of the challenge of interpreting these models. We present Iterative Null-space Projection (INLP), a novel method for removing information from neural representations. Our method is based on repeated training of linear classifiers that predict a certain property we aim to remove, followed by projection of the representations on their null-space. By doing so, the classifiers become oblivious to that target property, making it hard to linearly separate the data according to it. While applicable for multiple uses, we evaluate our method on bias and fairness use-cases, and show that our method is able to mitigate bias in word embeddings, as well as to increase fairness in a setting of multi-class classification.
You can open the pre-recorded video in a separate window.
NOTE: The SlidesLive video may display a random order of the authors. The correct author list is shown at the top of this webpage.

Similar Papers