SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models

Zhexin Zhang, Leqi Lei, Lindong Wu, Rui Sun, Yongkang Huang, Chong Long, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang


Abstract
With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing attention has been paid to their safety concerns. Consequently, evaluating the safety of LLMs has become an essential task for facilitating the broad applications of LLMs. Nevertheless, the absence of comprehensive safety evaluation benchmarks poses a significant impediment to effectively assess and enhance the safety of LLMs. In this work, we present SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the safety of LLMs, which comprises 11,435 diverse multiple choice questions spanning across 7 distinct categories of safety concerns. Notably, SafetyBench also incorporates both Chinese and English data, facilitating the evaluation in both languages. Our extensive tests over 25 popular Chinese and English LLMs in both zero-shot and few-shot settings reveal a substantial performance advantage for GPT-4 over its counterparts, and there is still significant room for improving the safety of current LLMs. We also demonstrate that the measured safety understanding abilities in SafetyBench are correlated with safety generation abilities. Data and evaluation guidelines are available at https://github.com/thu-coai/SafetyBench. Submission entrance and leaderboard are available at https://llmbench.ai/safety.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.830
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15537–15553
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.830
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.830
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhexin Zhang, Leqi Lei, Lindong Wu, Rui Sun, Yongkang Huang, Chong Long, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jie Tang, and Minlie Huang. 2024. SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15537–15553, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models (Zhang et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.830.pdf