The abundance of annotated data in natural language processing (NLP) poses both opportunities and challenges. While it enables the development of high-performing models for a variety of tasks, it also poses the risk of models learning harmful biases from the data, such as gender stereotypes. In this work, we investigate the role of attention, a widely-used technique in current state-of-the-art NLP models, in the propagation of social biases. Specifically, we study the relationship between the entropy of the attention distribution and the model's performance and fairness. We then propose a novel method for modulating attention weights to improve model fairness after training. Since our method is only applied post-training and pre-inference, it is an intra-processing method and is, therefore, less computationally expensive than existing in-processing and pre-processing approaches. Our results show an increase in fairness and minimal performance loss on different text classification and generation tasks using language models of varying sizes. WARNING: This work uses language that is offensive.

本文研究了自然语言处理中的社会偏见问题，提出了一种基于注意力机制调节权重的方法，增加模型的公平性，并提高不同规模语言模型下的分类和生成任务的表现。

调节注意力以实现公平：我们应该更多还是更少地参加？