Papers › Sensing and Steering Stereotypes: Extracting and Applying Gender Representation Vectors in LLMs
Sensing and Steering Stereotypes: Extracting and Applying Gender Representation Vectors in LLMs
Hannah Cyberey, Yangfeng Ji, David Evans
Large language models (LLMs) are known to perpetuate stereotypes and exhibit biases. Various strategies have been proposed to mitigate these biases, but most work studies biases in LLMs as a black-box problem without considering how concepts are represented within the model. We adapt techniques from representation engineering to study how the concept of "gender" is represented within LLMs. We introduce a new method that extracts concept representations via probability weighting without labeled data and efficiently selects a steering vector for measuring and manipulating the model's representation. We also present a projection-based method that enables precise steering of model predictions and demonstrate its effectiveness in mitigating gender bias in LLMs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hannahxchen/gender-bias-steering
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