Weight Pruning Amplifies Bias (AIIoT 2026)
Collection
36 pruned-LLM artifacts (3 models x 3 methods x 4 sparsities) for AIIoT 2026 bias-amplification paper. Research only - not for deployment. • 36 items • Updated
⚠️ Research artifact only — not for production use. This model was created to study fairness degradation under weight pruning. The companion paper (IEEE AIIoT 2026) demonstrates that random pruning at this sparsity level induces measurable bias amplification on the BBQ benchmark. Do not deploy this model in any user-facing or decision-making system.
Weight Pruning Amplifies Bias: A Multi-Method Study of Compressed LLMs for Edge AI Plawan Kumar Rath, Rahul Maliakkal. IEEE AIIoT 2026.
gemma (inherited from base model — see terms)randomMethod description. Uniform random unstructured pruning. Acts as a control to test whether observed effects come from the selection criterion or from sparsity itself.
| Metric | Value | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity (Tulu-3 SFT mix, 256×512) | 5,477,545 | dense baseline 8.94 (+61269978.3%) |
| SRS by category (s50) | Age: 0.337, Gender Identity: 0.317, Race/Ethnicity: 0.331, Religion: 0.315, SES: 0.340 | random-chance baseline ≈ 0.333 |
| Mean per-item inference latency (Apple Silicon, MLX) | 0.455s | identical to the dense baseline — unstructured pruning provides no latency benefit on dense GEMM kernels (paper §V.B) |
@inproceedings{rath2026pruning,
title = {Weight Pruning Amplifies Bias: A Multi-Method Study of Compressed LLMs for Edge AI},
author = {Rath, Plawan Kumar and Maliakkal, Rahul},
booktitle = {Proc. IEEE AIIoT 2026},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2605.08137},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass = {cs.LG},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08137}
}
Elfsong/BBQpruning_meta.json shipped in this repo (actual_sparsity, prune time, etc.).