Preference Tuning For Toxicity Mitigation Generalizes Across Languages

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, Xiaochen, Yong, Zheng-Xin, Bach, Stephen H.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Li, Xiaochen
Yong, Zheng-Xin
Bach, Stephen H.
author_facet Li, Xiaochen
Yong, Zheng-Xin
Bach, Stephen H.
contents Detoxifying multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) has become crucial due to their increasing global use. In this work, we explore zero-shot cross-lingual generalization of preference tuning in detoxifying LLMs. Unlike previous studies that show limited cross-lingual generalization for other safety tasks, we demonstrate that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training with only English data can significantly reduce toxicity in multilingual open-ended generations. For example, the probability of mGPT-1.3B generating toxic continuations drops from 46.8% to 3.9% across 17 different languages after training. Our results also extend to other multilingual LLMs, such as BLOOM, Llama3, and Aya-23. Using mechanistic interpretability tools like causal intervention and activation analysis, we identified the dual multilinguality property of MLP layers in LLMs, which explains the cross-lingual generalization of DPO. Finally, we show that bilingual sentence retrieval can predict the cross-lingual transferability of DPO preference tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_16235
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Preference Tuning For Toxicity Mitigation Generalizes Across Languages
Li, Xiaochen
Yong, Zheng-Xin
Bach, Stephen H.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Detoxifying multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) has become crucial due to their increasing global use. In this work, we explore zero-shot cross-lingual generalization of preference tuning in detoxifying LLMs. Unlike previous studies that show limited cross-lingual generalization for other safety tasks, we demonstrate that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) training with only English data can significantly reduce toxicity in multilingual open-ended generations. For example, the probability of mGPT-1.3B generating toxic continuations drops from 46.8% to 3.9% across 17 different languages after training. Our results also extend to other multilingual LLMs, such as BLOOM, Llama3, and Aya-23. Using mechanistic interpretability tools like causal intervention and activation analysis, we identified the dual multilinguality property of MLP layers in LLMs, which explains the cross-lingual generalization of DPO. Finally, we show that bilingual sentence retrieval can predict the cross-lingual transferability of DPO preference tuning.
title Preference Tuning For Toxicity Mitigation Generalizes Across Languages
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16235