SimpleSafetyTests: a Test Suite for Identifying Critical Safety Risks in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Vidgen, Bertie, Scherrer, Nino, Kirk, Hannah Rose, Qian, Rebecca, Kannappan, Anand, Hale, Scott A., Röttger, Paul
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Vidgen, Bertie
Scherrer, Nino
Kirk, Hannah Rose
Qian, Rebecca
Kannappan, Anand
Hale, Scott A.
Röttger, Paul
author_facet Vidgen, Bertie
Scherrer, Nino
Kirk, Hannah Rose
Qian, Rebecca
Kannappan, Anand
Hale, Scott A.
Röttger, Paul
contents The past year has seen rapid acceleration in the development of large language models (LLMs). However, without proper steering and safeguards, LLMs will readily follow malicious instructions, provide unsafe advice, and generate toxic content. We introduce SimpleSafetyTests (SST) as a new test suite for rapidly and systematically identifying such critical safety risks. The test suite comprises 100 test prompts across five harm areas that LLMs, for the vast majority of applications, should refuse to comply with. We test 11 open-access and open-source LLMs and four closed-source LLMs, and find critical safety weaknesses. While some of the models do not give a single unsafe response, most give unsafe responses to more than 20% of the prompts, with over 50% unsafe responses in the extreme. Prepending a safety-emphasising system prompt substantially reduces the occurrence of unsafe responses, but does not completely stop them from happening. Trained annotators labelled every model response to SST (n = 3,000). We use these annotations to evaluate five AI safety filters (which assess whether a models' response is unsafe given a prompt) as a way of automatically evaluating models' performance on SST. The filters' performance varies considerably. There are also differences across the five harm areas, and on the unsafe versus safe responses. The widely-used Perspective API has 72% accuracy and a newly-created zero-shot prompt to OpenAI's GPT-4 performs best with 89% accuracy. Content Warning: This paper contains prompts and responses that relate to child abuse, suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, scams and fraud, illegal items, and physical harm.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_08370
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SimpleSafetyTests: a Test Suite for Identifying Critical Safety Risks in Large Language Models
Vidgen, Bertie
Scherrer, Nino
Kirk, Hannah Rose
Qian, Rebecca
Kannappan, Anand
Hale, Scott A.
Röttger, Paul
Computation and Language
The past year has seen rapid acceleration in the development of large language models (LLMs). However, without proper steering and safeguards, LLMs will readily follow malicious instructions, provide unsafe advice, and generate toxic content. We introduce SimpleSafetyTests (SST) as a new test suite for rapidly and systematically identifying such critical safety risks. The test suite comprises 100 test prompts across five harm areas that LLMs, for the vast majority of applications, should refuse to comply with. We test 11 open-access and open-source LLMs and four closed-source LLMs, and find critical safety weaknesses. While some of the models do not give a single unsafe response, most give unsafe responses to more than 20% of the prompts, with over 50% unsafe responses in the extreme. Prepending a safety-emphasising system prompt substantially reduces the occurrence of unsafe responses, but does not completely stop them from happening. Trained annotators labelled every model response to SST (n = 3,000). We use these annotations to evaluate five AI safety filters (which assess whether a models' response is unsafe given a prompt) as a way of automatically evaluating models' performance on SST. The filters' performance varies considerably. There are also differences across the five harm areas, and on the unsafe versus safe responses. The widely-used Perspective API has 72% accuracy and a newly-created zero-shot prompt to OpenAI's GPT-4 performs best with 89% accuracy. Content Warning: This paper contains prompts and responses that relate to child abuse, suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, scams and fraud, illegal items, and physical harm.
title SimpleSafetyTests: a Test Suite for Identifying Critical Safety Risks in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08370