On Fairness of Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Models

Low-rank adaptation of large models, particularly LoRA, has gained traction due to its computational efficiency. This efficiency, contrasted with the prohibitive costs of full-model fine-tuning, means that practitioners often turn to LoRA and sometimes without a complete understanding of its ramifications. In this study, we focus on fairness and ask whether LoRA has an unexamined impact on utility, calibration, and resistance to membership inference across different subgroups (e.g., genders, races, religions) compared to a full-model fine-tuning baseline. We present extensive experiments across vision and language domains and across classification and generation tasks using ViT-Base, Swin-v2-Large, Llama-2 7B, and Mistral 7B. Intriguingly, experiments suggest that while one can isolate cases where LoRA exacerbates model bias across subgroups, the pattern is inconsistent -- in many cases, LoRA has equivalent or even improved fairness compared to the base model or its full fine-tuning baseline. We also examine the complications of evaluating fine-tuning fairness relating to task design and model token bias, calling for more careful fairness evaluations in future work.

Paper

Similar papers

Reviewer i2tt7/10 · confidence 5/52024-05-09

Summary

This work did a comprehensive benchmark of fairness for models fine-tuned by low-rank adaptation (LoRA). The models are evaluated on both classification and natural language tasks. --- After reading the authors response, I will retain my rating. For improving the current work, I would recommend the authors to evaluate the LoRA models enforced with fairness constraints.

Rating

7

Confidence

5

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

The evaluation results are technically solid. The paper is well written. The paper could attract a large number of audience interested in the fairness of large models.

Reasons to reject

My own observation is that there is no significant difference of fairness metrics between LoRA fine-tuned and fully fine-tuned models. I don't think such observation implies anything on whether LoRA may exacerbate the biases or not, given the fact that the learning objectives are still identical.

Questions to authors

1. Is the model fine-tuned subject to fairness constraints? If not, I would like to see the comparison to the LoRA models that are explicitly enforced with fairness constraints.

Reviewer tTvn3/10 · confidence 3/52024-05-10

Summary

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between Low-Rank adaptation and the fairness of language models. Fairness is an extremely important factor in a language model, especially if these language models are used for important decisions.

Rating

3

Confidence

3

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

The paper addresses fairness of Language Models.

Reasons to reject

The main research question is really unclear: the relation between Low-Rank adaptation and fairness is really questionable. Let's use a metaphor. Suppose the goal is to prepare a system that is fair in showing traffic jams by hiding plates. Clearly, this kind of system is expected to blur only plates and keep everything in a clear shape. Now, it is clear that if the system blurs the whole picture, it blurs the plates too. The goal of hiding the plates is accomplished but final images are useless. Now, out of the metaphor, low-ranking is acting indiscriminately over all the parameters. So, it is clear that it has effects on every aspect of LMs. Then, why focusing on fairness? Is there any reason why this low-ranking should act only on fairness?

Questions to authors

Provide a good reason why Low-Rank adaptation should have any influence on fairness of language models. See Reasons to Reject.

Reviewer yDCp6/10 · confidence 5/52024-05-11

Summary

This paper studies the impact of parameter-efficient fine-tuning on the fairness of downstream tasks. The paper compares their experimental results on various settings, including text/image classification, translation, and generation tasks. They compare their results with the full-finetuning setup. The paper notes that PEFT-based fine-tuning using LORA achieves comparable performance to full fine-tuning and does not consistently excavate the unfairness of the decisions. The paper also performs similar experiments to evaluate the calibration of the decisions and effectiveness against MIA attacks.

Rating

6

Confidence

5

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

1. The paper is well-written and easy to follow. 2. The paper evaluates an important safety aspect of the widely used PEFT technique. 3. The paper provides an extensive set of experiments to test the hypothesis of whether PEFT-based fine-tuning negatively impacts the fairness, calibration, or privacy leakage of the resultant model.

Reasons to reject

1. The paper's premise is unclear, why should LORA worsen the fairness of the model decisions? LoRA is meant as a way to approximate full fine-tuning and with higher LORA ranks we should be able to get the exact behaviour of full-finetuning. With lower ranks, it should underfit the data -- it is not obvious to me why that should worsen the fairness? Shouldn't it just be a function of the underlying data that is being used? With this logic, shouldn't the experimental results be expected (or even obvious)? A discussion around this would be helpful. 2. Although the paper limits itself to understanding the fairness impact of low-rank PEFT methods, it would be interesting to study the impact of other PEFT methods like adaptors, IA3, etc.

Reviewer Hiqr7/10 · confidence 3/52024-05-11

Summary

This paper shows empirical evaluations of the LoRA model on various downstream tasks by considering fairness across different sub-groups. The experimental results are informative and the conclusion that “LoRA rank has little impact on subgroup fairness” is interesting.

Rating

7

Confidence

3

Ethics flag

1

Reasons to accept

A detailed and comprehensive evaluation

Reasons to reject

For a draft focusing on evaluation, I think the included evaluation is sufficient.

Reviewer tTvn2024-06-04

Thank you for the explanation

Unfortunately, I'm not convinced of the validity of the hypothesis as, in my humble opinion, there is no causal effect between LoRa and fairness. I stay with my scores.

Authorsrebuttal2024-06-05

Dear Reviewer tTvn, Thank you for your engagement! We’d like to clarify that **we have not claimed a causal effect between LoRA and fairness in any part of the paper**. We hope to emphasize an important distinction between 1. Motivating the study of fairness because we hypothesized a causal effect, vs; 2. Motivating the study because fairness is not explored in the past and that there are connections to prior work that hints at a potential correlation to fairness. Again, we simply do not know if there is such a correlation (much less causation, as the reviewer is suggesting), and hence our study to find out. **It appears that the reviewer has been characterizing our work as (1), when our work is more of (2)**, as explained in Section 1 (intro) and our earlier response above. We hope that our study will be helpful for many researchers who may have different opinions on whether LoRA may have an unintended impact on fairness. Our goal is to provide experimental support so that interested researchers can use this study to either confirm or adjust their beliefs, as opposed to relying on *prior opinions* without evidence. We nevertheless acknowledge that it is the authors’ responsibility to make the above points clear and we hope to improve our presentation in the updated version. Thank you!

Program Chairsdecision2024-07-10

Decision

Accept

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