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Sprint projectMay 27, 2024

WashBench – A Benchmark for Assessing Softening of Harmful Content in LLM-generated Text Summaries

Sev Geraskin, Jakub Kryś, Luhan Mikaelson, Simon Wisdom · Team The washed ups

Submitted to AI Security Evaluation Hackathon: Measuring AI Capability. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: WashBench – A Benchmark for Assessing Softening of Harmful Content in LLM-generated Text Summaries

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In this work, we explore the tradeoff between toxicity removal and information retention in LLM-generated summaries. We hypothesize that LLMs are less likely to preserve toxic content when summarizing toxic text due to their safety fine-tuning to avoid generating toxic content. In high-stakes decision-making scenarios, where summary quality is important, this may create significant safety risks. To quantify this effect, we introduce WashBench, a benchmark containing manually annotated toxic content.

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@misc{geraskin2024washbench,
  title = {{WashBench – A Benchmark for Assessing Softening of Harmful Content in LLM-generated Text Summaries}},
  author = {Sev Geraskin and Jakub Kryś and Luhan Mikaelson and Simon Wisdom},
  year = {2024},
  month = may,
  note = {Submitted to AI Security Evaluation Hackathon: Measuring AI Capability, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/washbench-a-benchmark-for-assessing-softening-of-harmful-content-in-llm-generated-text-summaries}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/washbench-a-benchmark-for-assessing-softening-of-harmful-content-in-llm-generated-text-summaries}
}

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