All Languages Matter: On the Multilingual Safety of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Wenxuan, Tu, Zhaopeng, Chen, Chang, Yuan, Youliang, Huang, Jen-tse, Jiao, Wenxiang, Lyu, Michael R.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Wang, Wenxuan
Tu, Zhaopeng
Chen, Chang
Yuan, Youliang
Huang, Jen-tse
Jiao, Wenxiang
Lyu, Michael R.
author_facet Wang, Wenxuan
Tu, Zhaopeng
Chen, Chang
Yuan, Youliang
Huang, Jen-tse
Jiao, Wenxiang
Lyu, Michael R.
contents Safety lies at the core of developing and deploying large language models (LLMs). However, previous safety benchmarks only concern the safety in one language, e.g. the majority language in the pretraining data such as English. In this work, we build the first multilingual safety benchmark for LLMs, XSafety, in response to the global deployment of LLMs in practice. XSafety covers 14 kinds of commonly used safety issues across 10 languages that span several language families. We utilize XSafety to empirically study the multilingual safety for 4 widely-used LLMs, including both close-API and open-source models. Experimental results show that all LLMs produce significantly more unsafe responses for non-English queries than English ones, indicating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-English languages. In addition, we propose several simple and effective prompting methods to improve the multilingual safety of ChatGPT by evoking safety knowledge and improving cross-lingual generalization of safety alignment. Our prompting method can significantly reduce the ratio of unsafe responses from 19.1% to 9.7% for non-English queries. We release our data at https://github.com/Jarviswang94/Multilingual_safety_benchmark.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_00905
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle All Languages Matter: On the Multilingual Safety of Large Language Models
Wang, Wenxuan
Tu, Zhaopeng
Chen, Chang
Yuan, Youliang
Huang, Jen-tse
Jiao, Wenxiang
Lyu, Michael R.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Safety lies at the core of developing and deploying large language models (LLMs). However, previous safety benchmarks only concern the safety in one language, e.g. the majority language in the pretraining data such as English. In this work, we build the first multilingual safety benchmark for LLMs, XSafety, in response to the global deployment of LLMs in practice. XSafety covers 14 kinds of commonly used safety issues across 10 languages that span several language families. We utilize XSafety to empirically study the multilingual safety for 4 widely-used LLMs, including both close-API and open-source models. Experimental results show that all LLMs produce significantly more unsafe responses for non-English queries than English ones, indicating the necessity of developing safety alignment for non-English languages. In addition, we propose several simple and effective prompting methods to improve the multilingual safety of ChatGPT by evoking safety knowledge and improving cross-lingual generalization of safety alignment. Our prompting method can significantly reduce the ratio of unsafe responses from 19.1% to 9.7% for non-English queries. We release our data at https://github.com/Jarviswang94/Multilingual_safety_benchmark.
title All Languages Matter: On the Multilingual Safety of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00905