VoxSafeBench reveals that speech language models recognize social norms from text but fail to apply them when acoustic cues like speaker or scene determine the appropriate response.
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Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models
Canonical reference. 83% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences. We outline six specific risk areas: I. Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, V. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Interaction Harms, VI. Automation, Access, and Environmental Harms. The first area concerns the perpetuation of stereotypes, unfair discrimination, exclusionary norms, toxic language, and lower performance by social group for LMs. The second focuses on risks from private data leaks or LMs correctly inferring sensitive information. The third addresses risks arising from poor, false or misleading information including in sensitive domains, and knock-on risks such as the erosion of trust in shared information. The fourth considers risks from actors who try to use LMs to cause harm. The fifth focuses on risks specific to LLMs used to underpin conversational agents that interact with human users, including unsafe use, manipulation or deception. The sixth discusses the risk of environmental harm, job automation, and other challenges that may have a disparate effect on different social groups or communities. In total, we review 21 risks in-depth. We discuss the points of origin of different risks and point to potential mitigation approaches. Lastly, we discuss organisational responsibilities in implementing mitigations, and the role of collaboration and participation. We highlight directions for further research, particularly on expanding the toolkit for assessing and evaluating the outlined risks in LMs.
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- abstract This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences. We outline six specific risk areas: I. Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, V. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Inte
co-cited works
representative citing papers
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BiAxisAudit measures LLM bias on two axes—across-prompt sensitivity via factorial grids and within-response divergence via split coding—revealing that task format explains as much variance as model choice and that 63.6% of bias signals appear in only one layer.
Persona-driven workflow and interface improve automated and human-AI red-teaming of generative AI by incorporating diverse perspectives into adversarial prompt creation.
Decoding-time use of process reward models for bias mitigation raises fairness scores by up to 0.40 on a bilingual benchmark while preserving fluency across four LLMs and extends to open-ended generation with low overhead.
The paper delivers a unified framework for fairness in speech technologies by formalizing seven definitions, organizing research into three paradigms, diagnosing pipeline-specific biases, and mapping mitigations to those sources.
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Ghost-100 benchmark shows prompt tone drives hallucination rates and intensities in VLMs, with non-monotonic peaks at intermediate pressure and task-specific differences that aggregate metrics hide.
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Large Reasoning Models override their own initial safety recognition during multi-step reasoning in a failure mode called Self-Jailbreak, which Chain-of-Guardrail mitigates through targeted trajectory-level step interventions.
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citing papers explorer
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BiAxisAudit: A Novel Framework to Evaluate LLM Bias Across Prompt Sensitivity and Response-Layer Divergence
BiAxisAudit measures LLM bias on two axes—across-prompt sensitivity via factorial grids and within-response divergence via split coding—revealing that task format explains as much variance as model choice and that 63.6% of bias signals appear in only one layer.
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Decoding-Time Debiasing via Process Reward Models: From Controlled Fill-in to Open-Ended Generation
Decoding-time use of process reward models for bias mitigation raises fairness scores by up to 0.40 on a bilingual benchmark while preserving fluency across four LLMs and extends to open-ended generation with low overhead.
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OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models
OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.
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Transitivity Meets Cyclicity: Explicit Preference Decomposition for Dynamic Large Language Model Alignment
Introduces HRC model for game-theoretic decomposition of preferences into orthogonal transitive and cyclic components, paired with DSPPO for dynamic Nash-seeking alignment, reporting gains over BT and GPM baselines on RewardBench and downstream LLM evaluations.
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AlignCultura: Towards Culturally Aligned Large Language Models?
Align-Cultura introduces the CULTURAX dataset and shows that culturally fine-tuned LLMs improve joint HHH scores by 4-6%, cut cultural failures by 18%, and gain 10-12% efficiency with minimal leakage.
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WildGuard: Open One-Stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMs
WildGuard is a new open moderation model and dataset for LLM safety that identifies harmful prompts, risky responses, and refusal rates, achieving SOTA open-source performance and sometimes exceeding GPT-4 while cutting jailbreak success from 79.8% to 2.4%.
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Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models
Gemini Ultra reaches human-expert performance on MMLU for the first time and sets new state-of-the-art results on 30 of 32 benchmarks, including all 20 multimodal ones tested.
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Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4
Translating unsafe inputs to low-resource languages jailbreaks GPT-4 at rates on par with or exceeding state-of-the-art attacks.
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Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models
Repeating training data up to 4 epochs yields negligible loss increase versus unique data for fixed compute, and a new scaling law accounts for the decaying value of repeated tokens and excess parameters.
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Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations
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Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes
Distilling step-by-step uses LLM-generated rationales as additional supervision in a multi-task framework so that 770M-parameter models outperform 540B-parameter models on NLP benchmarks with only 80% of the data.
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Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models
PromptInject shows that simple adversarial prompts can cause goal hijacking and prompt leaking in GPT-3, exploiting its stochastic behavior.
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Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned
RLHF-aligned language models show increasing resistance to red teaming with scale up to 52B parameters, unlike prompted or rejection-sampled models, supported by a released dataset of 38,961 attacks.
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Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.
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Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
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Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
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PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways
PaLM 540B demonstrates continued scaling benefits by setting new few-shot SOTA results on hundreds of benchmarks and outperforming humans on BIG-bench.
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LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications
LaMDA shows that fine-tuning on human-value annotations and consulting external knowledge sources significantly improves safety and factual grounding in large dialog models beyond what scaling alone achieves.
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Multilingual jailbreaking of LLMs using low-resource languages
Multi-turn prompts in Afrikaans, Kiswahili, isiXhosa and isiZulu achieve 52-83% harmful response rates across GPT, Claude, Gemini and others, rising further with native-speaker red-teaming, showing translation quality limits jailbreak success.
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Quantifying and Predicting Disagreement in Graded Human Ratings
Annotation disagreement on toxic language can be moderately predicted from textual features, with high-opposition items proving harder for models to estimate accurately.
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Representational Harms in LLM-Generated Narratives Against Global Majority Nationalities
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The PICCO Framework for Large Language Model Prompting: A Taxonomy and Reference Architecture for Prompt Structure
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TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models
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PaLM 2 Technical Report
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Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, A Large-Scale Generative Language Model
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Responsible Federated LLMs via Safety Filtering and Constitutional AI
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Inertia in Moral and Value Judgments of Large Language Models
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Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology
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Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges
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Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size
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