Refuse Whenever You Feel Unsafe: Improving Safety in LLMs via Decoupled
  Refusal Training
Authors: name: Youliang Yuan, name: Wenxiang Jiao, name: Wenxuan Wang, name: Jen-tse Huang, name: Jiahao Xu, name: Tian Liang, name: Pinjia He, name: Zhaopeng Tu

This study addresses a critical gap in safety tuning practices for Large
Language Models (LLMs) by identifying and tackling a refusal position bias
within safety tuning data, which compromises the models' ability to
appropriately refuse generating unsafe content. We introduce a novel approach,
Decoupled Refusal Training (DeRTa), designed to empower LLMs to refuse
compliance to harmful prompts at any response position, significantly enhancing
their safety capabilities. DeRTa incorporates two novel components: (1) Maximum
Likelihood Estimation (MLE) with Harmful Response Prefix, which trains models
to recognize and avoid unsafe content by appending a segment of harmful
response to the beginning of a safe response, and (2) Reinforced Transition
Optimization (RTO), which equips models with the ability to transition from
potential harm to safety refusal consistently throughout the harmful response
sequence. Our empirical evaluation, conducted using LLaMA3 and Mistral model
families across six attack scenarios, demonstrates that our method not only
improves model safety without compromising performance but also surpasses
well-known models such as GPT-4 in defending against attacks. Importantly, our
approach successfully defends recent advanced attack methods (e.g., CodeAttack)
that have jailbroken GPT-4 and LLaMA3-70B-Instruct. Our code and data can be
found at https://github.com/RobustNLP/DeRTa.