The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Aakanksha, Ahmadian, Arash, Ermis, Beyza, Goldfarb-Tarrant, Seraphina, Kreutzer, Julia, Fadaee, Marzieh, Hooker, Sara
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Aakanksha
Ahmadian, Arash
Ermis, Beyza
Goldfarb-Tarrant, Seraphina
Kreutzer, Julia
Fadaee, Marzieh
Hooker, Sara
author_facet Aakanksha
Ahmadian, Arash
Ermis, Beyza
Goldfarb-Tarrant, Seraphina
Kreutzer, Julia
Fadaee, Marzieh
Hooker, Sara
contents A key concern with the concept of "alignment" is the implicit question of "alignment to what?". AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms common in Western-centric datasets. Here, we explore the viability of different alignment approaches when balancing dual objectives: addressing and optimizing for a non-homogeneous set of languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms. We collect the first set of human annotated red-teaming prompts in different languages distinguishing between global and local harm, which serve as a laboratory for understanding the reliability of alignment techniques when faced with preference distributions that are non-stationary across geographies and languages. While this setting is seldom covered by the literature to date, which primarily centers on English harm mitigation, it captures real-world interactions with AI systems around the world. We establish a new precedent for state-of-the-art alignment techniques across 6 languages with minimal degradation in general performance. Our work provides important insights into cross-lingual transfer and novel optimization approaches to safeguard AI systems designed to serve global populations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18682
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm
Aakanksha
Ahmadian, Arash
Ermis, Beyza
Goldfarb-Tarrant, Seraphina
Kreutzer, Julia
Fadaee, Marzieh
Hooker, Sara
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
A key concern with the concept of "alignment" is the implicit question of "alignment to what?". AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms common in Western-centric datasets. Here, we explore the viability of different alignment approaches when balancing dual objectives: addressing and optimizing for a non-homogeneous set of languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms. We collect the first set of human annotated red-teaming prompts in different languages distinguishing between global and local harm, which serve as a laboratory for understanding the reliability of alignment techniques when faced with preference distributions that are non-stationary across geographies and languages. While this setting is seldom covered by the literature to date, which primarily centers on English harm mitigation, it captures real-world interactions with AI systems around the world. We establish a new precedent for state-of-the-art alignment techniques across 6 languages with minimal degradation in general performance. Our work provides important insights into cross-lingual transfer and novel optimization approaches to safeguard AI systems designed to serve global populations.
title The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18682