Detectors for Safe and Reliable LLMs: Implementations, Uses, and Limitations

9 Mar 2024 · Swapnaja Achintalwar, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Ateret Anaby-Tavor, Ioana Baldini, Sara E. Berger, Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee, Djallel Bouneffouf, Subhajit Chaudhury, Pin-Yu Chen, Lamogha Chiazor, Elizabeth M. Daly, Rogério Abreu de Paula, Pierre Dognin, Eitan Farchi, Soumya Ghosh, Michael Hind, Raya Horesh, George Kour, Ja Young Lee, Erik Miehling, Keerthiram Murugesan, Manish Nagireddy, Inkit Padhi, David Piorkowski, Ambrish Rawat, Orna Raz, Prasanna Sattigeri, Hendrik Strobelt, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Christoph Tillmann, Aashka Trivedi, Kush R. Varshney, Dennis Wei, Shalisha Witherspooon, Marcel Zalmanovici ·

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a variety of risks, from non-faithful output to biased and toxic generations. Due to several limiting factors surrounding LLMs (training cost, API access, data availability, etc.), it may not always be feasible to impose direct safety constraints on a deployed model. Therefore, an efficient and reliable alternative is required. To this end, we present our ongoing efforts to create and deploy a library of detectors: compact and easy-to-build classification models that provide labels for various harms. In addition to the detectors themselves, we discuss a wide range of uses for these detector models - from acting as guardrails to enabling effective AI governance. We also deep dive into inherent challenges in their development and discuss future work aimed at making the detectors more reliable and broadening their scope.

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