CohereLabsCommunity/multilingual_safety_survey2025 huggingface dataset:
Advancing Spoken Dialog Systems for Manufacturing: From Conceptual Architecture and Taxonomy to Real Case Applications and Future Directions
Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Young Reseachers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems, 2023
Topics: general safety, LLM alignment

This research encompasses a comprehensive exploration of Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs) in the manufacturing sector. It begins by establishing a conceptual architecture and taxonomy to guide the design and selection of SDS elements. Real case applications, including worker safety and cybersecurity support, validate the research findings and highlight areas for improvement. Looking ahead, the study delves into the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal applications. Emphasizing the importance of extreme personalization, the study highlights the need to cater to the diverse qualifications and preferences of workers. Additionally, it investigates the integration of SDSs with other sensory modalities, such as images, videos, and augmented or virtual reality scenarios, to enhance the user experience and productivity. The research also addresses crucial considerations related to knowledge base optimization. It examines semantic variations of words across different application contexts, the continuous updating of procedures and data, and the adaptability of SDSs to diverse dialects and linguistic abilities, particularly in low-schooling personnel scenarios. Privacy, industrial protection, and ethical concerns in the era of LLMs and external players like OpenAI are given due attention. The study explores the boundaries of knowledge that conversational systems should possess, advocating for transparency, explainability, and responsible data handling practices.
Unveiling the Implicit Toxicity in Large Language Models
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: toxicity, bias

The open-endedness of large language models (LLMs) combined with their impressive capabilities may lead to new safety issues when being exploited for malicious use. While recent studies primarily focus on probing toxic outputs that can be easily detected with existing toxicity classifiers, we show that LLMs can generate diverse implicit toxic outputs that are exceptionally difficult to detect via simply zero-shot prompting. Moreover, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based attacking method to further induce the implicit toxicity in LLMs. Specifically, we optimize the language model with a reward that prefers implicit toxic outputs to explicit toxic and non-toxic ones. Experiments on five widely-adopted toxicity classifiers demonstrate that the attack success rate can be significantly improved through RL fine-tuning. For instance, the RL-finetuned LLaMA-13B model achieves an attack success rate of 90.04% on BAD and 62.85% on Davinci003. Our findings suggest that LLMs pose a significant threat in generating undetectable implicit toxic outputs. We further show that fine-tuning toxicity classifiers on the annotated examples from our attacking method can effectively enhance their ability to detect LLM-generated implicit toxic language.
Did You Mean...? Confidence-based Trade-offs in Semantic Parsing
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: general safety, LLM alignment

We illustrate how a calibrated model can help balance common trade-offs in task-oriented parsing. In a simulated annotator-in-the-loop experiment, we show that well-calibrated confidence scores allow us to balance cost with annotator load, improving accuracy with a small number of interactions. We then examine how confidence scores can help optimize the trade-off between usability and safety. We show that confidence-based thresholding can substantially reduce the number of incorrect low-confidence programs executed; however, this comes at a cost to usability. We propose the DidYouMean system which better balances usability and safety by rephrasing low-confidence inputs.
Regulation and NLP (RegNLP): Taming Large Language Models
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: policy

The scientific innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and more broadly in artificial intelligence (AI) is at its fastest pace to date. As large language models (LLMs) unleash a new era of automation, important debates emerge regarding the benefits and risks of their development, deployment and use. Currently, these debates have been dominated by often polarized narratives mainly led by the AI Safety and AI Ethics movements. This polarization, often amplified by social media, is swaying political agendas on AI regulation and governance and posing issues of regulatory capture. Capture occurs when the regulator advances the interests of the industry it is supposed to regulate, or of special interest groups rather than pursuing the general public interest. Meanwhile in NLP research, attention has been increasingly paid to the discussion of regulating risks and harms. This often happens without systematic methodologies or sufficient rooting in the disciplines that inspire an extended scope of NLP research, jeopardizing the scientific integrity of these endeavors. Regulation studies are a rich source of knowledge on how to systematically deal with risk and uncertainty, as well as with scientific evidence, to evaluate and compare regulatory options. This resource has largely remained untapped so far. In this paper, we argue how NLP research on these topics can benefit from proximity to regulatory studies and adjacent fields. We do so by discussing basic tenets of regulation, and risk and uncertainty, and by highlighting the shortcomings of current NLP discussions dealing with risk assessment. Finally, we advocate for the development of a new multidisciplinary research space on regulation and NLP (RegNLP), focused on connecting scientific knowledge to regulatory processes based on systematic methodologies.
FaMeSumm: Investigating and Improving Faithfulness of Medical Summarization
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: hallucination, factuality
Languages covered: German, English

Summaries of medical text shall be faithful by being consistent and factual with source inputs, which is an important but understudied topic for safety and efficiency in healthcare. In this paper, we investigate and improve faithfulness in summarization on a broad range of medical summarization tasks. Our investigation reveals that current summarization models often produce unfaithful outputs for medical input text. We then introduce FaMeSumm, a framework to improve faithfulness by fine-tuning pre-trained language models based on medical knowledge. FaMeSumm performs contrastive learning on designed sets of faithful and unfaithful summaries, and it incorporates medical terms and their contexts to encourage faithful generation of medical terms. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three datasets in two languages: health question and radiology report summarization datasets in English, and a patient-doctor dialogue dataset in Chinese. Results demonstrate that FaMeSumm is flexible and effective by delivering consistent improvements over mainstream language models such as BART, T5, mT5, and PEGASUS, yielding state-of-the-art performances on metrics for faithfulness and general quality. Human evaluation by doctors also shows that FaMeSumm generates more faithful outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FaMeSumm.
BanglaAbuseMeme: A Dataset for Bengali Abusive Meme Classification
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: toxicity, bias
Languages covered: Bengali

The dramatic increase in the use of social media platforms for information sharing has also fueled a steep growth in online abuse. A simple yet effective way of abusing individuals or communities is by creating memes, which often integrate an image with a short piece of text layered on top of it. Such harmful elements are in rampant use and are a threat to online safety. Hence it is necessary to develop efficient models to detect and flag abusive memes. The problem becomes more challenging in a low-resource setting (e.g., Bengali memes, i.e., images with Bengali text embedded on it) because of the absence of benchmark datasets on which AI models could be trained. In this paper we bridge this gap by building a Bengali meme dataset. To setup an effective benchmark we implement several baseline models for classifying abusive memes using this dataset. We observe that multimodal models that use both textual and visual information outperform unimodal models. Our best-performing model achieves a macro F1 score of 70.51. Finally, we perform a qualitative error analysis of the misclassified memes of the best-performing text-based, image-based and multimodal models.
Mitigating Societal Harms in Large Language Models
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: general safety, LLM alignment

Numerous recent studies have highlighted societal harms that can be caused by language technologies deployed in the wild. While several surveys, tutorials, and workshops have discussed the risks of harms in specific contexts – e.g., detecting and mitigating gender bias in NLP models – no prior work has developed a unified typology of technical approaches for mitigating harms of language generation models. Our tutorial is based on a survey we recently wrote that proposes such a typology. We will provide an overview of potential social issues in language generation, including toxicity, social biases, misinformation, factual inconsistency, and privacy violations. Our primary focus will be on how to systematically identify risks, and how eliminate them at various stages of model development, from data collection, to model development, to inference/language generation. Through this tutorial, we aim to equip NLP researchers and engineers with a suite of practical tools for mitigating safety risks from pretrained language generation models.
Gentopia.AI: A Collaborative Platform for Tool-Augmented LLMs
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: others

Augmented Language Models (ALMs) empower large language models with the ability to use tools, transforming them into intelligent agents for real-world interactions. However, most existing frameworks for ALMs, to varying degrees, are deficient in the following critical features: flexible customization, collaborative democratization, and holistic evaluation. This paper proposes Gentopia, a lightweight and extensible framework for ALMs. Gentopia allows the flexible customization of agents through simple configurations, seamlessly integrating various language models, task formats, prompting modules, and plugins into a unified paradigm. Furthermore, we establish Gentpool, a public platform enabling the registration and sharing of user-customized agents. Agents registered in Gentpool are composable such that they can be assembled together for agent collaboration, advancing the democratization of artificial intelligence. To ensure high-quality agents, Gentbench, an integral component of Gentpool, is designed to thoroughly evaluate user-customized agents across diverse aspects such as safety, robustness, efficiency, etc. We release Gentopia on Github and will continuously move forward.
AART: AI-Assisted Red-Teaming with Diverse Data Generation for New LLM-powered Applications
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: jailbreaking attacks

Adversarially testing large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their safe and responsible deployment in practice. We introduce an AI-assisted approach for automated generation of adversarial evaluation datasets to test the safety of LLM generations on new downstream applications. We call it AART AI-assisted Red-Teaming - an automated alternative to current manual red-teaming efforts. AART offers a data generation and augmentation pipeline of reusable and customizable recipes that reduce significantly human effort and enable integration of adversarial testing earlier in new product development. AART generates evaluation datasets with high diversity of content characteristics critical for effective adversarial testing (e.g. sensitive and harmful concepts, specific to a wide range of cultural and geographic regions and application scenarios). The data generation is steered by AI-assisted recipes to define, scope and prioritize diversity within a new application context. This feeds into a structured LLM-generation process that scales up evaluation priorities. This provides transparency of developers evaluation intentions and enables quick adaptation to new use cases and newly discovered model weaknesses. Compared to some of the state-of-the-art tools AART shows promising results in terms of concept coverage and data quality.
Towards Safer Operations: An Expert-involved Dataset of High-Pressure Gas Incidents for Preventing Future Failures
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: general safety, LLM alignment
Languages covered: Japanese

This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (The IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).
DELPHI: Data for Evaluating LLMs’ Performance in Handling Controversial Issues
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023
Topics: toxicity, bias

Controversy is a reflection of our zeitgeist, and an important aspect to any discourse. The rise of large language models (LLMs) as conversational systems has increased public reliance on these systems for answers to their various questions. Consequently, it is crucial to systematically examine how these models respond to questions that pertaining to ongoing debates. However, few such datasets exist in providing human-annotated labels reflecting the contemporary discussions. To foster research in this area, we propose a novel construction of a controversial questions dataset, expanding upon the publicly released Quora Question Pairs Dataset. This dataset presents challenges concerning knowledge recency, safety, fairness, and bias. We evaluate different LLMs using a subset of this dataset, illuminating how they handle controversial issues and the stances they adopt. This research ultimately contributes to our understanding of LLMs’ interaction with controversial issues, paving the way for improvements in their comprehension and handling of complex societal debates.
Investigating Hallucinations in Pruned Large Language Models for Abstractive Summarization
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 12, 2024
Topics: hallucination, factuality

Despite the remarkable performance of generative large language models (LLMs) on abstractive summarization, they face two significant challenges: their considerable size and tendency to hallucinate. Hallucinations are concerning because they erode reliability and raise safety issues. Pruning is a technique that reduces model size by removing redundant weights, enabling more efficient sparse inference. Pruned models yield downstream task performance comparable to the original, making them ideal alternatives when operating on a limited budget. However, the effect that pruning has upon hallucinations in abstractive summarization with LLMs has yet to be explored. In this paper, we provide an extensive empirical study across five summarization datasets, two state-of-the-art pruning methods, and five instruction-tuned LLMs. Surprisingly, we find that hallucinations are less prevalent from pruned LLMs than the original models. Our analysis suggests that pruned models tend to depend more on the source document for summary generation. This leads to a higher lexical overlap between the generated summary and the source document, which could be a reason for the reduction in hallucination risk.1
CogErgLLM: Exploring Large Language Model Systems Design Perspective Using Cognitive Ergonomics
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Science (NLP4Science), 2024
Topics: general safety, LLM alignment

Integrating cognitive ergonomics with LLMs is crucial for improving safety, reliability, and user satisfaction in human-AI interactions. Current LLM designs often lack this integration, resulting in systems that may not fully align with human cognitive capabilities and limitations. This oversight exacerbates biases in LLM outputs and leads to suboptimal user experiences due to inconsistent application of user-centered design principles. Researchers are increasingly leveraging NLP, particularly LLMs, to model and understand human behavior across social sciences, psychology, psychiatry, health, and neuroscience. Our position paper explores the need to integrate cognitive ergonomics into LLM design, providing a comprehensive framework and practical guidelines for ethical development. By addressing these challenges, we aim to advance safer, more reliable, and ethically sound human-AI interactions.
Gemma Scope: Open Sparse Autoencoders Everywhere All At Once on Gemma 2
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 2024
Topics: others

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network’s latent representations into seemingly interpretable features.Despite recent excitement about their potential, research applications outside of industry are limited by the high cost of training a comprehensive suite of SAEs.In this work, we introduce Gemma Scope, an open suite of JumpReLU SAEs trained on all layers and sub-layers of Gemma 2 2B and 9B and select layers of Gemma 2 27B base models.We primarily train SAEs on the Gemma 2 pre-trained models, but additionally release SAEs trained on instruction-tuned Gemma 2 9B for comparison.We evaluate the quality of each SAE on standard metrics and release these results.We hope that by releasing these SAE weights, we can help make more ambitious safety and interpretability research easier for the community. Weights and a tutorial can be found at https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-scope and an interactive demo can be found at https://neuronpedia.org/gemma-scope.
Pruning for Protection: Increasing Jailbreak Resistance in Aligned LLMs Without Fine-Tuning
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 2024
Topics: jailbreaking attacks

This paper investigates the impact of model compression on the way Large Language Models (LLMs) process prompts, particularly concerning jailbreak resistance. We show that moderate WANDA pruning can enhance resistance to jailbreaking attacks without fine-tuning, while maintaining performance on standard benchmarks. To systematically evaluate this safety enhancement, we introduce a dataset of 225 harmful tasks across five categories. Our analysis of LLaMA-2 Chat, Vicuna 1.3, and Mistral Instruct v0.2 reveals that pruning benefits correlate with initial model safety levels. We interpret these results by examining changes in attention patterns and perplexity shifts, demonstrating that pruned models exhibit sharper attention and increased sensitivity to artificial jailbreak constructs. We extend our evaluation to the AdvBench harmful behavior tasks and the GCG attack method. We find that LLaMA-2 is much safer on AdvBench prompts than on our dataset when evaluated with manual jailbreak attempts, and that pruning is effective against both automated attacks and manual jailbreaking on Advbench.
Investigating Layer Importance in Large Language Models
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, 2024
Topics: others

Large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention due to their prominent ability to understand and process texts. Nevertheless, LLMs largely remain opaque. The lack of understanding of LLMs has obstructed the deployment in safety-critical scenarios and hindered the development of better models. In this study, we advance the understanding of LLM by investigating the significance of individual layers in LLMs. We propose an efficient sampling method to faithfully evaluate the importance of layers using Shapley values, a widely used explanation framework in feature attribution and data valuation. In addition, we conduct layer ablation experiments to assess the performance degradation resulting from the exclusion of specific layers. Our findings reveal the existence of cornerstone layers, wherein certain early layers can exhibit a dominant contribution over others. Removing one cornerstone layer leads to a drastic collapse of the model performance, often reducing it to random guessing. Conversely, removing non-cornerstone layers results in only marginal performance changes. This study identifies cornerstone layers in LLMs and underscores their critical role for future research.
SAFETY-J: Evaluating Safety with Critique
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, 2024
Topics: general safety, LLM alignment
Languages covered: English, Chinese

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in content generation raises significant safety concerns, particularly regarding the transparency and interpretability of content evaluations. Current methods, primarily focused on binary safety classifications, lack mechanisms for detailed critique, limiting their utility for model improvement and user trust. To address these limitations, we introduce SAFETY-J, a bilingual generative safety evaluator for English and Chinese with critique-based judgment. SAFETY-J utilizes a robust training dataset that includes diverse dialogues and augmented query-response pairs to assess safety across various scenarios comprehensively. We establish an automated meta-evaluation benchmark that objectively assesses the quality of critiques with minimal human intervention, facilitating scalable and continuous improvement. Additionally, SAFETY-Jemploys an iterative preference learning technique to dynamically refine safety assessments based on meta-evaluations and critiques. Our evaluations demonstrate that SAFETY-J provides more nuanced and accurate safety evaluations, thereby enhancing both critique quality and predictive reliability in complex content scenarios. To facilitate further research and application, we have released SAFETY-J’s training protocols, datasets, and code at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/Safety-J.