From Representational Harms to Quality-of-Service Harms: A Case Study on Llama 2 Safety Safeguards

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chehbouni, Khaoula, Roshan, Megha, Ma, Emmanuel, Wei, Futian Andrew, Taik, Afaf, Cheung, Jackie CK, Farnadi, Golnoosh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chehbouni, Khaoula
Roshan, Megha
Ma, Emmanuel
Wei, Futian Andrew
Taik, Afaf
Cheung, Jackie CK
Farnadi, Golnoosh
author_facet Chehbouni, Khaoula
Roshan, Megha
Ma, Emmanuel
Wei, Futian Andrew
Taik, Afaf
Cheung, Jackie CK
Farnadi, Golnoosh
contents Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in various domains. However, these advancements have also introduced additional safety risks and raised concerns regarding their detrimental impact on already marginalized populations. Despite growing mitigation efforts to develop safety safeguards, such as supervised safety-oriented fine-tuning and leveraging safe reinforcement learning from human feedback, multiple concerns regarding the safety and ingrained biases in these models remain. Furthermore, previous work has demonstrated that models optimized for safety often display exaggerated safety behaviors, such as a tendency to refrain from responding to certain requests as a precautionary measure. As such, a clear trade-off between the helpfulness and safety of these models has been documented in the literature. In this paper, we further investigate the effectiveness of safety measures by evaluating models on already mitigated biases. Using the case of Llama 2 as an example, we illustrate how LLMs' safety responses can still encode harmful assumptions. To do so, we create a set of non-toxic prompts, which we then use to evaluate Llama models. Through our new taxonomy of LLMs responses to users, we observe that the safety/helpfulness trade-offs are more pronounced for certain demographic groups which can lead to quality-of-service harms for marginalized populations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_13213
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Representational Harms to Quality-of-Service Harms: A Case Study on Llama 2 Safety Safeguards
Chehbouni, Khaoula
Roshan, Megha
Ma, Emmanuel
Wei, Futian Andrew
Taik, Afaf
Cheung, Jackie CK
Farnadi, Golnoosh
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in various domains. However, these advancements have also introduced additional safety risks and raised concerns regarding their detrimental impact on already marginalized populations. Despite growing mitigation efforts to develop safety safeguards, such as supervised safety-oriented fine-tuning and leveraging safe reinforcement learning from human feedback, multiple concerns regarding the safety and ingrained biases in these models remain. Furthermore, previous work has demonstrated that models optimized for safety often display exaggerated safety behaviors, such as a tendency to refrain from responding to certain requests as a precautionary measure. As such, a clear trade-off between the helpfulness and safety of these models has been documented in the literature. In this paper, we further investigate the effectiveness of safety measures by evaluating models on already mitigated biases. Using the case of Llama 2 as an example, we illustrate how LLMs' safety responses can still encode harmful assumptions. To do so, we create a set of non-toxic prompts, which we then use to evaluate Llama models. Through our new taxonomy of LLMs responses to users, we observe that the safety/helpfulness trade-offs are more pronounced for certain demographic groups which can lead to quality-of-service harms for marginalized populations.
title From Representational Harms to Quality-of-Service Harms: A Case Study on Llama 2 Safety Safeguards
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13213