The Scales of Justitia: A Comprehensive Survey on Safety Evaluation of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Songyang, Li, Chaozhuo, Qiu, Jiameng, Zhang, Xi, Huang, Feiran, Zhang, Litian, Hei, Yiming, Yu, Philip S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909877372190720
author Liu, Songyang
Li, Chaozhuo
Qiu, Jiameng
Zhang, Xi
Huang, Feiran
Zhang, Litian
Hei, Yiming
Yu, Philip S.
author_facet Liu, Songyang
Li, Chaozhuo
Qiu, Jiameng
Zhang, Xi
Huang, Feiran
Zhang, Litian
Hei, Yiming
Yu, Philip S.
contents With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including content generation, human-computer interaction, machine translation, and code generation. However, their widespread deployment has also raised significant safety concerns. In particular, LLM-generated content can exhibit unsafe behaviors such as toxicity, bias, or misinformation, especially in adversarial contexts, which has attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry. Although numerous studies have attempted to evaluate these risks, a comprehensive and systematic survey on safety evaluation of LLMs is still lacking. This work aims to fill this gap by presenting a structured overview of recent advances in safety evaluation of LLMs. Specifically, we propose a four-dimensional taxonomy: (i) Why to evaluate, which explores the background of safety evaluation of LLMs, how they differ from general LLMs evaluation, and the significance of such evaluation; (ii) What to evaluate, which examines and categorizes existing safety evaluation tasks based on key capabilities, including dimensions such as toxicity, robustness, ethics, bias and fairness, truthfulness, and related aspects; (iii) Where to evaluate, which summarizes the evaluation metrics, datasets and benchmarks currently used in safety evaluations; (iv) How to evaluate, which reviews existing mainstream evaluation methods based on the roles of the evaluators and some evaluation frameworks that integrate the entire evaluation pipeline. Finally, we identify the challenges in safety evaluation of LLMs and propose promising research directions to promote further advancement in this field. We emphasize the necessity of prioritizing safety evaluation to ensure the reliable and responsible deployment of LLMs in real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11094
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Scales of Justitia: A Comprehensive Survey on Safety Evaluation of LLMs
Liu, Songyang
Li, Chaozhuo
Qiu, Jiameng
Zhang, Xi
Huang, Feiran
Zhang, Litian
Hei, Yiming
Yu, Philip S.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including content generation, human-computer interaction, machine translation, and code generation. However, their widespread deployment has also raised significant safety concerns. In particular, LLM-generated content can exhibit unsafe behaviors such as toxicity, bias, or misinformation, especially in adversarial contexts, which has attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry. Although numerous studies have attempted to evaluate these risks, a comprehensive and systematic survey on safety evaluation of LLMs is still lacking. This work aims to fill this gap by presenting a structured overview of recent advances in safety evaluation of LLMs. Specifically, we propose a four-dimensional taxonomy: (i) Why to evaluate, which explores the background of safety evaluation of LLMs, how they differ from general LLMs evaluation, and the significance of such evaluation; (ii) What to evaluate, which examines and categorizes existing safety evaluation tasks based on key capabilities, including dimensions such as toxicity, robustness, ethics, bias and fairness, truthfulness, and related aspects; (iii) Where to evaluate, which summarizes the evaluation metrics, datasets and benchmarks currently used in safety evaluations; (iv) How to evaluate, which reviews existing mainstream evaluation methods based on the roles of the evaluators and some evaluation frameworks that integrate the entire evaluation pipeline. Finally, we identify the challenges in safety evaluation of LLMs and propose promising research directions to promote further advancement in this field. We emphasize the necessity of prioritizing safety evaluation to ensure the reliable and responsible deployment of LLMs in real-world applications.
title The Scales of Justitia: A Comprehensive Survey on Safety Evaluation of LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11094