STOP! Benchmarking Large Language Models with Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions

Robert Morabito, Sangmitra Madhusudan, Tyler McDonald, Ali Emami


Abstract
Mitigating explicit and implicit biases in Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a critical focus in the field of natural language processing. However, many current methodologies evaluate scenarios in isolation, without considering the broader context or the spectrum of potential biases within each situation. To address this, we introduce the Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions (STOP) dataset, which includes 450 offensive progressions containing 2,700 unique sentences of varying severity that progressively escalate from less to more explicitly offensive. Covering a broad spectrum of 9 demographics and 46 sub-demographics, STOP ensures inclusivity and comprehensive coverage. We evaluate several leading closed- and open-source models, including GPT-4, Mixtral, and Llama 3. Our findings reveal that even the best-performing models detect bias inconsistently, with success rates ranging from 19.3% to 69.8%. Furthermore, we demonstrate how aligning models with human judgments on STOP can improve model answer rates on sensitive tasks such as BBQ, StereoSet, and CrowS-Pairs by up to 191%, while maintaining or even improving performance. STOP presents a novel framework for assessing the complex nature of biases in LLMs, which will enable more effective bias mitigation strategies and facilitates the creation of fairer language models.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.243
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4221–4243
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.243/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.243
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Robert Morabito, Sangmitra Madhusudan, Tyler McDonald, and Ali Emami. 2024. STOP! Benchmarking Large Language Models with Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4221–4243, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
STOP! Benchmarking Large Language Models with Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions (Morabito et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.243.pdf