SLM as Guardian: Pioneering AI Safety with Small Language Models

Most prior safety research of large language models (LLMs) has focused on enhancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit the safety requirements of humans. However, internalizing such safeguard features into larger models brought challenges of higher training cost and unintended degradation of helpfulness. To overcome such challenges, a modular approach employing a smaller LLM to detect harmful user queries is regarded as a convenient solution in designing LLM-based system with safety requirements. In this paper, we leverage a smaller LLM for both harmful query detection and safeguard response generation. We introduce our safety requirements and the taxonomy of harmfulness categories, and then propose a multi-task learning mechanism fusing the two tasks into a single model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, providing on par or surpassing harmful query detection and safeguard response performance compared to the publicly available LLMs.

Taxonomy and Analysis of Sensitive User Queries in Generative AI Search

Although there has been a growing interest among industries to integrate generative LLMs into their services, limited experiences and scarcity of resources acts as a barrier in launching and servicing large-scale LLM-based conversational services. In this paper, we share our experiences in developing and operating generative AI models within a national-scale search engine, with a specific focus on the sensitiveness of user queries. We propose a taxonomy for sensitive search queries, outline our approaches, and present a comprehensive analysis report on sensitive queries from actual users.

Breaking Down Word Semantics from Pre-trained Language Models through Layer-wise Dimension Selection

Contextual word embeddings obtained from pre-trained language model (PLM) have proven effective for various natural language processing tasks at the word level. However, interpreting the hidden aspects within embeddings, such as syntax and semantics, remains challenging. Disentangled representation learning has emerged as a promising approach, which separates specific aspects into distinct embeddings. Furthermore, different linguistic knowledge is believed to be stored in different layers of PLM. This paper aims to disentangle semantic sense from BERT by applying a binary mask to middle outputs across the layers, without updating pre-trained parameters. The disentangled embeddings are evaluated through binary classification to determine if the target word in two different sentences has the same meaning. Experiments with cased BERT$_{\texttt{base}}$ show that leveraging layer-wise information is effective and disentangling semantic sense further improve performance.