arXiv Computation and Language

Fair-GPTQ: Bias-Aware Quantization for Large Language Models

Fair-GPTQ is a quantization method for large language models that incorporates explicit group‑fairness constraints into the quantization objective. By guiding the rounding operation, it reduces bias in generated text, particularly for occupational stereotypes and discriminatory language across gender, race, and religion. The approach maintains at least 90 % of baseline accuracy on zero‑shot benchmarks while preserving the memory and speed benefits of 4‑bit quantization.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Let's Unlearn Stereotypes Before Decision-Making: Assessing the Impact of Intrinsic Bias Mitigation on Downstream Fairness in LLMs

arXiv:2509. 16462v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes decision-making systems, where biased predictions can reinforce social and economic disparities.

By Mina Arzaghi, Alireza Dehghanpour Farashah, Florian Carichon, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Plante, Golnoosh Farnadi
arXiv AI
Oct 28

Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained

The paper "Fairness Definitions in Language Models Explained" surveys and clarifies various fairness notions applicable to language models (LMs). It introduces a taxonomy categorizing these concepts by transformer architecture—encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder—and demonstrates each definition through experiments to illustrate practical implications. The authors also discuss current research challenges and open questions to encourage further innovation in the field.

By Zhipeng Yin, Zichong Wang, Avash Palikhe, Wenbin Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Debias-SparseGPT: Bias-Aware Pruning for Large Language Models

Debias‑SparseGPT is a post‑training pruning technique that adds a representational debiasing term based on demographically contrasting inputs to mitigate bias amplification caused by weight sparsification. The method is validated across various generative LLMs and sparsity levels (25%, 50%, and structured 2:4), consistently reducing pruning‑induced bias while maintaining perplexity and zero‑shot accuracy. In the most aggressive 2:4 sparsity regime, enriching the calibration set with long‑context, content‑rich examples further improves both downstream performance and fairness.

By Irina Proskurina, Guillaume Metzler, Antoine Gourru, Julien Velcin
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

A Comprehensive Evaluation on Quantization Techniques for Large Language Models

The paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of post‑training quantization (PTQ) techniques for large language models (LLMs), addressing gaps in prior work by conducting fair, large‑scale experiments on text‑only LLMs. It decouples quantization into pre‑quantization transformation and error mitigation, systematically studies granularity, symmetry, and data formats (MXFP4, NVFP4), and finds that rotation‑based transformations and low‑rank compensation with GPTQ can improve performance, while finer granularity and asymmetric quantization benefit activations more than weights. The study highlights the importance of understanding component interactions and the impact of scaling factor formats on low‑bit quantization performance.

By Yutong Liu, Cairong Zhao, Guosheng Hu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Investigating Social Bias Changes in Quantized Language Models

Post‑training quantization of large language models reduces memory usage but can alter social biases in ways that aggregate metrics miss. In a large‑scale study of 50 quantized models on PostTrainingBiasBench, the authors discovered a phenomenon called quantization‑induced bias flipping, where up to 21% of responses switch from biased to unbiased or vice versa, especially for uncertain predictions and stronger quantization (4‑bit vs 8‑bit). These flips lead to asymmetric impacts across demographic groups, with some groups experiencing up to an 18.6% worsening of bias while others improve by 14.1%, resulting in misleadingly neutral overall scores.

By Stanley Z. Hua, Sanae Lotfi, Irene Y. Chen