SafetyAnalyst: Interpretable, Transparent, and Steerable Safety Moderation for AI Behavior

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Jing-Jing, Pyatkin, Valentina, Kleiman-Weiner, Max, Jiang, Liwei, Dziri, Nouha, Collins, Anne G. E., Borg, Jana Schaich, Sap, Maarten, Choi, Yejin, Levine, Sydney
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Li, Jing-Jing
Pyatkin, Valentina
Kleiman-Weiner, Max
Jiang, Liwei
Dziri, Nouha
Collins, Anne G. E.
Borg, Jana Schaich
Sap, Maarten
Choi, Yejin
Levine, Sydney
author_facet Li, Jing-Jing
Pyatkin, Valentina
Kleiman-Weiner, Max
Jiang, Liwei
Dziri, Nouha
Collins, Anne G. E.
Borg, Jana Schaich
Sap, Maarten
Choi, Yejin
Levine, Sydney
contents The ideal AI safety moderation system would be both structurally interpretable (so its decisions can be reliably explained) and steerable (to align to safety standards and reflect a community's values), which current systems fall short on. To address this gap, we present SafetyAnalyst, a novel AI safety moderation framework. Given an AI behavior, SafetyAnalyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning to analyze its potential consequences by creating a structured "harm-benefit tree," which enumerates harmful and beneficial actions and effects the AI behavior may lead to, along with likelihood, severity, and immediacy labels that describe potential impacts on stakeholders. SafetyAnalyst then aggregates all effects into a harmfulness score using 28 fully interpretable weight parameters, which can be aligned to particular safety preferences. We applied this framework to develop an open-source LLM prompt safety classification system, distilled from 18.5 million harm-benefit features generated by frontier LLMs on 19k prompts. On comprehensive benchmarks, we show that SafetyAnalyst (average F1=0.81) outperforms existing moderation systems (average F1$<$0.72) on prompt safety classification, while offering the additional advantages of interpretability, transparency, and steerability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16665
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SafetyAnalyst: Interpretable, Transparent, and Steerable Safety Moderation for AI Behavior
Li, Jing-Jing
Pyatkin, Valentina
Kleiman-Weiner, Max
Jiang, Liwei
Dziri, Nouha
Collins, Anne G. E.
Borg, Jana Schaich
Sap, Maarten
Choi, Yejin
Levine, Sydney
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
The ideal AI safety moderation system would be both structurally interpretable (so its decisions can be reliably explained) and steerable (to align to safety standards and reflect a community's values), which current systems fall short on. To address this gap, we present SafetyAnalyst, a novel AI safety moderation framework. Given an AI behavior, SafetyAnalyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning to analyze its potential consequences by creating a structured "harm-benefit tree," which enumerates harmful and beneficial actions and effects the AI behavior may lead to, along with likelihood, severity, and immediacy labels that describe potential impacts on stakeholders. SafetyAnalyst then aggregates all effects into a harmfulness score using 28 fully interpretable weight parameters, which can be aligned to particular safety preferences. We applied this framework to develop an open-source LLM prompt safety classification system, distilled from 18.5 million harm-benefit features generated by frontier LLMs on 19k prompts. On comprehensive benchmarks, we show that SafetyAnalyst (average F1=0.81) outperforms existing moderation systems (average F1$<$0.72) on prompt safety classification, while offering the additional advantages of interpretability, transparency, and steerability.
title SafetyAnalyst: Interpretable, Transparent, and Steerable Safety Moderation for AI Behavior
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16665