Daily Papers

Despite remarkable advances that large language models have achieved in chatbots, maintaining a non-toxic user-AI interactive environment has become increasingly critical nowadays. However, previous efforts in toxicity detection have been mostly based on benchmarks derived from social media content, leaving the unique challenges inherent to real-world user-AI interactions insufficiently explored. In this work, we introduce ToxicChat, a novel benchmark based on real user queries from an open-source chatbot. This benchmark contains the rich, nuanced phenomena that can be tricky for current toxicity detection models to identify, revealing a significant domain difference compared to social media content. Our systematic evaluation of models trained on existing toxicity datasets has shown their shortcomings when applied to this unique domain of ToxicChat. Our work illuminates the potentially overlooked challenges of toxicity detection in real-world user-AI conversations. In the future, ToxicChat can be a valuable resource to drive further advancements toward building a safe and healthy environment for user-AI interactions.

The discourse around toxicity and LLMs in NLP largely revolves around detection tasks. This work shifts the focus to evaluating LLMs' reasoning about toxicity -- from their explanations that justify a stance -- to enhance their trustworthiness in downstream tasks. Despite extensive research on explainability, it is not straightforward to adopt existing methods to evaluate free-form toxicity explanation due to their over-reliance on input text perturbations, among other challenges. To account for these, we propose a novel, theoretically-grounded multi-dimensional criterion, Human-Aligned Faithfulness (HAF), that measures the extent to which LLMs' free-form toxicity explanations align with those of a rational human under ideal conditions. We develop six metrics, based on uncertainty quantification, to comprehensively evaluate \haf of LLMs' toxicity explanations with no human involvement, and highlight how "non-ideal" the explanations are. We conduct several experiments on three Llama models (of size up to 70B) and an 8B Ministral model on five diverse toxicity datasets. Our results show that while LLMs generate plausible explanations to simple prompts, their reasoning about toxicity breaks down when prompted about the nuanced relations between the complete set of reasons, the individual reasons, and their toxicity stances, resulting in inconsistent and nonsensical responses. We open-source our code and LLM-generated explanations at https://github.com/uofthcdslab/HAF.

Traditional toxicity detection models have focused on the single utterance level without deeper understanding of context. We introduce CONDA, a new dataset for in-game toxic language detection enabling joint intent classification and slot filling analysis, which is the core task of Natural Language Understanding (NLU). The dataset consists of 45K utterances from 12K conversations from the chat logs of 1.9K completed Dota 2 matches. We propose a robust dual semantic-level toxicity framework, which handles utterance and token-level patterns, and rich contextual chatting history. Accompanying the dataset is a thorough in-game toxicity analysis, which provides comprehensive understanding of context at utterance, token, and dual levels. Inspired by NLU, we also apply its metrics to the toxicity detection tasks for assessing toxicity and game-specific aspects. We evaluate strong NLU models on CONDA, providing fine-grained results for different intent classes and slot classes. Furthermore, we examine the coverage of toxicity nature in our dataset by comparing it with other toxicity datasets.

As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare and medicine continue to advance, there is a growing need for competitive open-source models that can safeguard public interest. With the increasing availability of highly competitive open base models, the impact of continued pre-training is increasingly uncertain. In this work, we explore the role of instruct tuning, model merging, alignment, red teaming and advanced inference schemes, as means to improve current open models. To that end, we introduce the Aloe family, a set of open medical LLMs highly competitive within its scale range. Aloe models are trained on the current best base models (Mistral, LLaMA 3), using a new custom dataset which combines public data sources improved with synthetic Chain of Thought (CoT). Aloe models undergo an alignment phase, becoming one of the first few policy-aligned open healthcare LLM using Direct Preference Optimization, setting a new standard for ethical performance in healthcare LLMs. Model evaluation expands to include various bias and toxicity datasets, a dedicated red teaming effort, and a much-needed risk assessment for healthcare LLMs. Finally, to explore the limits of current LLMs in inference, we study several advanced prompt engineering strategies to boost performance across benchmarks, yielding state-of-the-art results for open healthcare 7B LLMs, unprecedented at this scale.

Getting large language models (LLMs) to refuse to answer hostile toxicity questions is a core issue under the theme of LLMs security. Previous approaches have used prompts engineering to jailbreak LLMs and answer some toxicity questions. These approaches can easily fail after the model manufacturer makes additional fine-tuning to the model. To promote the further understanding of model jailbreaking by researchers, we are inspired by Representation Engineering to propose a jailbreaking method that does not require elaborate construction prompts, is not affected by model fine-tuning, and can be widely applied to any open-source LLMs in a pluggable manner. We have evaluated this method on multiple mainstream LLMs on carefully supplemented toxicity datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the significant effectiveness of our approach. After being surprised by some interesting jailbreaking cases, we did extensive in-depth research to explore the techniques behind this method.

Existing approaches to multilingual text detoxification are hampered by the scarcity of parallel multilingual datasets. In this work, we introduce a pipeline for the generation of multilingual parallel detoxification data. We also introduce SynthDetoxM, a manually collected and synthetically generated multilingual parallel text detoxification dataset comprising 16,000 high-quality detoxification sentence pairs across German, French, Spanish and Russian. The data was sourced from different toxicity evaluation datasets and then rewritten with nine modern open-source LLMs in few-shot setting. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on the produced synthetic datasets have superior performance to those trained on the human-annotated MultiParaDetox dataset even in data limited setting. Models trained on SynthDetoxM outperform all evaluated LLMs in few-shot setting. We release our dataset and code to help further research in multilingual text detoxification.

Pretraining datasets are foundational to the development of multimodal models, yet they often have inherent biases and toxic content from the web-scale corpora they are sourced from. In this paper, we investigate the prevalence of toxicity in LLaVA image-text pretraining dataset, examining how harmful content manifests in different modalities. We present a comprehensive analysis of common toxicity categories and propose targeted mitigation strategies, resulting in the creation of a refined toxicity-mitigated dataset. This dataset removes 7,531 of toxic image-text pairs in the LLaVA pre-training dataset. We offer guidelines for implementing robust toxicity detection pipelines. Our findings underscore the need to actively identify and filter toxic content - such as hate speech, explicit imagery, and targeted harassment - to build more responsible and equitable multimodal systems. The toxicity-mitigated dataset is open source and is available for further research.

Existing toxic detection models face significant limitations, such as lack of transparency, customization, and reproducibility. These challenges stem from the closed-source nature of their training data and the paucity of explanations for their evaluation mechanism. To address these issues, we propose a dataset creation mechanism that integrates voting and chain-of-thought processes, producing a high-quality open-source dataset for toxic content detection. Our methodology ensures diverse classification metrics for each sample and includes both classification scores and explanatory reasoning for the classifications. We utilize the dataset created through our proposed mechanism to train our model, which is then compared against existing widely-used detectors. Our approach not only enhances transparency and customizability but also facilitates better fine-tuning for specific use cases. This work contributes a robust framework for developing toxic content detection models, emphasizing openness and adaptability, thus paving the way for more effective and user-specific content moderation solutions.

Text detoxification has the potential to mitigate the harms of toxicity by rephrasing text to remove offensive meaning, but subtle toxicity remains challenging to tackle. We introduce MaRCo, a detoxification algorithm that combines controllable generation and text rewriting methods using a Product of Experts with autoencoder language models (LMs). MaRCo uses likelihoods under a non-toxic LM (expert) and a toxic LM (anti-expert) to find candidate words to mask and potentially replace. We evaluate our method on several subtle toxicity and microaggressions datasets, and show that it not only outperforms baselines on automatic metrics, but MaRCo's rewrites are preferred 2.1 times more in human evaluation. Its applicability to instances of subtle toxicity is especially promising, demonstrating a path forward for addressing increasingly elusive online hate.

With the rapid growth in language processing applications, fairness has emerged as an important consideration in data-driven solutions. Although various fairness definitions have been explored in the recent literature, there is lack of consensus on which metrics most accurately reflect the fairness of a system. In this work, we propose a new formulation : ACCUMULATED PREDICTION SENSITIVITY, which measures fairness in machine learning models based on the model's prediction sensitivity to perturbations in input features. The metric attempts to quantify the extent to which a single prediction depends on a protected attribute, where the protected attribute encodes the membership status of an individual in a protected group. We show that the metric can be theoretically linked with a specific notion of group fairness (statistical parity) and individual fairness. It also correlates well with humans' perception of fairness. We conduct experiments on two text classification datasets : JIGSAW TOXICITY, and BIAS IN BIOS, and evaluate the correlations between metrics and manual annotations on whether the model produced a fair outcome. We observe that the proposed fairness metric based on prediction sensitivity is statistically significantly more correlated with human annotation than the existing counterfactual fairness metric.

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are shown to easily generate toxic language. In this work, we systematically explore domain-adaptive training to reduce the toxicity of language models. We conduct this study on three dimensions: training corpus, model size, and parameter efficiency. For the training corpus, we propose to leverage the generative power of LMs and generate nontoxic datasets for domain-adaptive training, which mitigates the exposure bias and is shown to be more data-efficient than using a curated pre-training corpus. We demonstrate that the self-generation method consistently outperforms the existing baselines across various model sizes on both automatic and human evaluations, even when it uses a 1/3 smaller training corpus. We then comprehensively study detoxifying LMs with parameter sizes ranging from 126M up to 530B (3x larger than GPT-3), a scale that has never been studied before. We find that i) large LMs have similar toxicity levels as smaller ones given the same pre-training corpus, and ii) large LMs require more endeavor to detoxify. We also explore parameter-efficient training methods for detoxification. We demonstrate that adding and training adapter-only layers in LMs not only saves a lot of parameters but also achieves a better trade-off between toxicity and perplexity than whole model adaptation for the large-scale models.

Toxic conversations during software development interactions may have serious repercussions on a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development project. For example, victims of toxic conversations may become afraid to express themselves, therefore get demotivated, and may eventually leave the project. Automated filtering of toxic conversations may help a FOSS community to maintain healthy interactions among its members. However, off-the-shelf toxicity detectors perform poorly on Software Engineering (SE) datasets, such as one curated from code review comments. To encounter this challenge, we present ToxiCR, a supervised learning-based toxicity identification tool for code review interactions. ToxiCR includes a choice to select one of the ten supervised learning algorithms, an option to select text vectorization techniques, eight preprocessing steps, and a large-scale labeled dataset of 19,571 code review comments. Two out of those eight preprocessing steps are SE domain specific. With our rigorous evaluation of the models with various combinations of preprocessing steps and vectorization techniques, we have identified the best combination for our dataset that boosts 95.8% accuracy and 88.9% F1 score. ToxiCR significantly outperforms existing toxicity detectors on our dataset. We have released our dataset, pre-trained models, evaluation results, and source code publicly available at: https://github.com/WSU-SEAL/ToxiCR

Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the leading open-weight models creators. At the same time, there researchers are working to make language models safer. We propose a data curation pipeline to reduce harmful outputs by models trained on public domain data. There are unique challenges to working with public domain data, as these sources differ from web text in both form and content. Many sources are historical documents and are the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Consequently, current state-of-the-art approaches to toxicity filtering are often infeasible or inappropriate for open data models. In this paper, we introduce a new fully open-source pipeline for open-data toxicity filtering. Our contributions are threefold. We create a custom training dataset, ToxicCommons, which is composed of texts which have been classified across five different dimensions (racial/origin-based, gender/sex-based, religious, ability-based discrimination, and violence). We use this dataset to train a custom classifier, Celadon, that can be used to detect toxic content in open data more efficiently at a larger scale. Finally, we describe the balanced approach to content filtration that optimizes safety filtering with respect to the filtered data available for training.

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to our professional workflows and daily lives. Nevertheless, these machine companions of ours have a critical flaw: the huge amount of data which endows them with vast and diverse knowledge, also exposes them to the inevitable toxicity and bias. While most LLMs incorporate defense mechanisms to prevent the generation of harmful content, these safeguards can be easily bypassed with minimal prompt engineering. In this paper, we introduce the new Thoroughly Engineered Toxicity (TET) dataset, comprising manually crafted prompts designed to nullify the protective layers of such models. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate the pivotal role of TET in providing a rigorous benchmark for evaluation of toxicity awareness in several popular LLMs: it highlights the toxicity in the LLMs that might remain hidden when using normal prompts, thus revealing subtler issues in their behavior.

Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages. The data and other artifacts created as part of this work are released with permissive licenses.

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to various real-world applications, leveraging massive, web-sourced datasets like Common Crawl, C4, and FineWeb for pretraining. While these datasets provide linguistic data essential for high-quality natural language generation, they often contain harmful content, such as hate speech, misinformation, and biased narratives. Training LLMs on such unfiltered data risks perpetuating toxic behaviors, spreading misinformation, and amplifying societal biases which can undermine trust in LLM-driven applications and raise ethical concerns about their use. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of inappropriate content across these datasets, offering a comprehensive taxonomy that categorizes harmful webpages into Topical and Toxic based on their intent. We also introduce a prompt evaluation dataset, a high-accuracy Topical and Toxic Prompt (TTP), and a transformer-based model (HarmFormer) for content filtering. Additionally, we create a new multi-harm open-ended toxicity benchmark (HAVOC) and provide crucial insights into how models respond to adversarial toxic inputs. Upon publishing, we will also opensource our model signal on the entire C4 dataset. Our work offers insights into ensuring safer LLM pretraining and serves as a resource for Responsible AI (RAI) compliance.

Despite extensive research on toxic speech detection in text, a critical gap remains in handling spoken Mandarin audio. The lack of annotated datasets that capture the unique prosodic cues and culturally specific expressions in Mandarin leaves spoken toxicity underexplored. To address this, we introduce ToxicTone -- the largest public dataset of its kind -- featuring detailed annotations that distinguish both forms of toxicity (e.g., profanity, bullying) and sources of toxicity (e.g., anger, sarcasm, dismissiveness). Our data, sourced from diverse real-world audio and organized into 13 topical categories, mirrors authentic communication scenarios. We also propose a multimodal detection framework that integrates acoustic, linguistic, and emotional features using state-of-the-art speech and emotion encoders. Extensive experiments show our approach outperforms text-only and baseline models, underscoring the essential role of speech-specific cues in revealing hidden toxic expressions.

In large language model (LLM) pretraining, data quality is believed to determine model quality. In this paper, we re-examine the notion of "quality" from the perspective of pre- and post-training co-design. Specifically, we explore the possibility that pre-training on more toxic data can lead to better control in post-training, ultimately decreasing a model's output toxicity. First, we use a toy experiment to study how data composition affects the geometry of features in the representation space. Next, through controlled experiments with Olmo-1B models trained on varying ratios of clean and toxic data, we find that the concept of toxicity enjoys a less entangled linear representation as the proportion of toxic data increases. Furthermore, we show that although toxic data increases the generational toxicity of the base model, it also makes the toxicity easier to remove. Evaluations on Toxigen and Real Toxicity Prompts demonstrate that models trained on toxic data achieve a better trade-off between reducing generational toxicity and preserving general capabilities when detoxifying techniques such as inference-time intervention (ITI) are applied. Our findings suggest that, with post-training taken into account, bad data may lead to good models.

Pretrained neural language models (LMs) are prone to generating racist, sexist, or otherwise toxic language which hinders their safe deployment. We investigate the extent to which pretrained LMs can be prompted to generate toxic language, and the effectiveness of controllable text generation algorithms at preventing such toxic degeneration. We create and release RealToxicityPrompts, a dataset of 100K naturally occurring, sentence-level prompts derived from a large corpus of English web text, paired with toxicity scores from a widely-used toxicity classifier. Using RealToxicityPrompts, we find that pretrained LMs can degenerate into toxic text even from seemingly innocuous prompts. We empirically assess several controllable generation methods, and find that while data- or compute-intensive methods (e.g., adaptive pretraining on non-toxic data) are more effective at steering away from toxicity than simpler solutions (e.g., banning "bad" words), no current method is failsafe against neural toxic degeneration. To pinpoint the potential cause of such persistent toxic degeneration, we analyze two web text corpora used to pretrain several LMs (including GPT-2; Radford et. al, 2019), and find a significant amount of offensive, factually unreliable, and otherwise toxic content. Our work provides a test bed for evaluating toxic generations by LMs and stresses the need for better data selection processes for pretraining.

As large language models become increasingly integrated into daily life, detecting implicit toxicity across diverse contexts is crucial. To this end, we introduce LifeTox, a dataset designed for identifying implicit toxicity within a broad range of advice-seeking scenarios. Unlike existing safety datasets, LifeTox comprises diverse contexts derived from personal experiences through open-ended questions. Experiments demonstrate that RoBERTa fine-tuned on LifeTox matches or surpasses the zero-shot performance of large language models in toxicity classification tasks. These results underscore the efficacy of LifeTox in addressing the complex challenges inherent in implicit toxicity.

Hate speech and toxic comments are a common concern of social media platform users. Although these comments are, fortunately, the minority in these platforms, they are still capable of causing harm. Therefore, identifying these comments is an important task for studying and preventing the proliferation of toxicity in social media. Previous work in automatically detecting toxic comments focus mainly in English, with very few work in languages like Brazilian Portuguese. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale dataset for Brazilian Portuguese with tweets annotated as either toxic or non-toxic or in different types of toxicity. We present our dataset collection and annotation process, where we aimed to select candidates covering multiple demographic groups. State-of-the-art BERT models were able to achieve 76% macro-F1 score using monolingual data in the binary case. We also show that large-scale monolingual data is still needed to create more accurate models, despite recent advances in multilingual approaches. An error analysis and experiments with multi-label classification show the difficulty of classifying certain types of toxic comments that appear less frequently in our data and highlights the need to develop models that are aware of different categories of toxicity.

Language detoxification involves removing toxicity from offensive language. While a neutral-toxic paired dataset provides a straightforward approach for training detoxification models, creating such datasets presents several challenges: i) the need for human annotation to build paired data, and ii) the rapid evolution of offensive terms, rendering static datasets quickly outdated. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an automated paired data generation pipeline, called K/DA. This pipeline is designed to generate offensive language with implicit offensiveness and trend-aligned slang, making the resulting dataset suitable for detoxification model training. We demonstrate that the dataset generated by K/DA exhibits high pair consistency and greater implicit offensiveness compared to existing Korean datasets, and also demonstrates applicability to other languages. Furthermore, it enables effective training of a high-performing detoxification model with simple instruction fine-tuning.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to their extensive global deployment, and ensuring their safety calls for comprehensive and multilingual toxicity evaluations. However, existing toxicity benchmarks are overwhelmingly focused on English, posing serious risks to deploying LLMs in other languages. We address this by introducing PolygloToxicityPrompts (PTP), the first large-scale multilingual toxicity evaluation benchmark of 425K naturally occurring prompts spanning 17 languages. We overcome the scarcity of naturally occurring toxicity in web-text and ensure coverage across languages with varying resources by automatically scraping over 100M web-text documents. Using PTP, we investigate research questions to study the impact of model size, prompt language, and instruction and preference-tuning methods on toxicity by benchmarking over 60 LLMs. Notably, we find that toxicity increases as language resources decrease or model size increases. Although instruction- and preference-tuning reduce toxicity, the choice of preference-tuning method does not have any significant impact. Our findings shed light on crucial shortcomings of LLM safeguarding and highlight areas for future research.

Automatic toxic language detection is critical for creating safe, inclusive online spaces. However, it is a highly subjective task, with perceptions of toxic language shaped by community norms and lived experience. Existing toxicity detection models are typically trained on annotations that collapse diverse annotator perspectives into a single ground truth, erasing important context-specific notions of toxicity such as reclaimed language. To address this, we introduce MODELCITIZENS, a dataset of 6.8K social media posts and 40K toxicity annotations across diverse identity groups. To capture the role of conversational context on toxicity, typical of social media posts, we augment MODELCITIZENS posts with LLM-generated conversational scenarios. State-of-the-art toxicity detection tools (e.g. OpenAI Moderation API, GPT-o4-mini) underperform on MODELCITIZENS, with further degradation on context-augmented posts. Finally, we release LLAMACITIZEN-8B and GEMMACITIZEN-12B, LLaMA- and Gemma-based models finetuned on MODELCITIZENS, which outperform GPT-o4-mini by 5.5% on in-distribution evaluations. Our findings highlight the importance of community-informed annotation and modeling for inclusive content moderation. The data, models and code are available at https://github.com/asuvarna31/modelcitizens.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) tuned on machine-generated instruction-following data have demonstrated remarkable performance in various multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. However, the hallucinations inherent in machine-generated data, which could lead to hallucinatory outputs in MLLMs, remain under-explored. This work aims to investigate various hallucinations (i.e., object, relation, attribute hallucinations) and mitigate those hallucinatory toxicities in large-scale machine-generated visual instruction datasets. Drawing on the human ability to identify factual errors, we present a novel hallucination detection and elimination framework, HalluciDoctor, based on the cross-checking paradigm. We use our framework to identify and eliminate hallucinations in the training data automatically. Interestingly, HalluciDoctor also indicates that spurious correlations arising from long-tail object co-occurrences contribute to hallucinations. Based on that, we execute counterfactual visual instruction expansion to balance data distribution, thereby enhancing MLLMs' resistance to hallucinations. Comprehensive experiments on hallucination evaluation benchmarks show that our method successfully mitigates 44.6% hallucinations relatively and maintains competitive performance compared to LLaVA.The source code will be released at https://github.com/Yuqifan1117/HalluciDoctor.

Drug toxicity remains a major challenge in pharmaceutical development. Recent machine learning models have improved in silico toxicity prediction, but their reliance on annotated data and lack of interpretability limit their applicability. This limits their ability to capture organ-specific toxicities driven by complex biological mechanisms. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative through step-by-step reasoning and integration of textual data, yet prior approaches lack biological context and transparent rationale. To address this issue, we propose CoTox, a novel framework that integrates LLM with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-toxicity prediction. CoTox combines chemical structure data, biological pathways, and gene ontology (GO) terms to generate interpretable toxicity predictions through step-by-step reasoning. Using GPT-4o, we show that CoTox outperforms both traditional machine learning and deep learning model. We further examine its performance across various LLMs to identify where CoTox is most effective. Additionally, we find that representing chemical structures with IUPAC names, which are easier for LLMs to understand than SMILES, enhances the model's reasoning ability and improves predictive performance. To demonstrate its practical utility in drug development, we simulate the treatment of relevant cell types with drug and incorporated the resulting biological context into the CoTox framework. This approach allow CoTox to generate toxicity predictions aligned with physiological responses, as shown in case study. This result highlights the potential of LLM-based frameworks to improve interpretability and support early-stage drug safety assessment. The code and prompt used in this work are available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/CoTox.

This paper introduces fourteen novel datasets for the evaluation of Large Language Models' safety in the context of enterprise tasks. A method was devised to evaluate a model's safety, as determined by its ability to follow instructions and output factual, unbiased, grounded, and appropriate content. In this research, we used OpenAI GPT as point of comparison since it excels at all levels of safety. On the open-source side, for smaller models, Meta Llama2 performs well at factuality and toxicity but has the highest propensity for hallucination. Mistral hallucinates the least but cannot handle toxicity well. It performs well in a dataset mixing several tasks and safety vectors in a narrow vertical domain. Gemma, the newly introduced open-source model based on Google Gemini, is generally balanced but trailing behind. When engaging in back-and-forth conversation (multi-turn prompts), we find that the safety of open-source models degrades significantly. Aside from OpenAI's GPT, Mistral is the only model that still performed well in multi-turn tests.

To date, toxicity mitigation in language models has almost entirely been focused on single-language settings. As language models embrace multilingual capabilities, it's crucial our safety measures keep pace. Recognizing this research gap, our approach expands the scope of conventional toxicity mitigation to address the complexities presented by multiple languages. In the absence of sufficient annotated datasets across languages, we employ translated data to evaluate and enhance our mitigation techniques. We also compare finetuning mitigation approaches against retrieval-augmented techniques under both static and continual toxicity mitigation scenarios. This allows us to examine the effects of translation quality and the cross-lingual transfer on toxicity mitigation. We also explore how model size and data quantity affect the success of these mitigation efforts. Covering nine languages, our study represents a broad array of linguistic families and levels of resource availability, ranging from high to mid-resource languages. Through comprehensive experiments, we provide insights into the complexities of multilingual toxicity mitigation, offering valuable insights and paving the way for future research in this increasingly important field. Code and data are available at https://github.com/for-ai/goodtriever.

Many of the recent breakthroughs in language modeling have resulted from scaling effectively the same model architecture to larger datasets. In this vein, recent work has highlighted performance gains from increasing training dataset size and quality, suggesting a need for novel sources of large-scale datasets. In this work, we introduce BeanCounter, a public dataset consisting of more than 159B tokens extracted from businesses' disclosures. We show that this data is indeed novel: less than 0.1% of BeanCounter appears in Common Crawl-based datasets and it is an order of magnitude larger than datasets relying on similar sources. Given the data's provenance, we hypothesize that BeanCounter is comparatively more factual and less toxic than web-based datasets. Exploring this hypothesis, we find that many demographic identities occur with similar prevalence in BeanCounter but with significantly less toxic context relative to other datasets. To demonstrate the utility of BeanCounter, we evaluate and compare two LLMs continually pre-trained on BeanCounter with their base models. We find an 18-33% reduction in toxic generation and improved performance within the finance domain for the continually pretrained models. Collectively, our work suggests that BeanCounter is a novel source of low-toxicity and high-quality domain-specific data with sufficient scale to train multi-billion parameter LLMs.

Caution: This paper includes offensive words that could potentially cause unpleasantness. The fast-paced evolution of generative language models such as GPT-4 has demonstrated outstanding results in various NLP generation tasks. However, due to the potential generation of offensive words related to race or gender, various Controllable Text Generation (CTG) methods have been proposed to mitigate the occurrence of harmful words. However, existing CTG methods not only reduce toxicity but also negatively impact several aspects of the language model's generation performance, including topic consistency, grammar, and perplexity. This paper explores the limitations of previous methods and introduces a novel solution in the form of a simple Gated Toxicity Avoidance (GTA) that can be applied to any CTG method. We also evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GTA by comparing it with state-of-the-art CTG methods across various datasets. Our findings reveal that gated toxicity avoidance efficiently achieves comparable levels of toxicity reduction to the original CTG methods while preserving the generation performance of the language model.

Large language models (LM) generate remarkably fluent text and can be efficiently adapted across NLP tasks. Measuring and guaranteeing the quality of generated text in terms of safety is imperative for deploying LMs in the real world; to this end, prior work often relies on automatic evaluation of LM toxicity. We critically discuss this approach, evaluate several toxicity mitigation strategies with respect to both automatic and human evaluation, and analyze consequences of toxicity mitigation in terms of model bias and LM quality. We demonstrate that while basic intervention strategies can effectively optimize previously established automatic metrics on the RealToxicityPrompts dataset, this comes at the cost of reduced LM coverage for both texts about, and dialects of, marginalized groups. Additionally, we find that human raters often disagree with high automatic toxicity scores after strong toxicity reduction interventions -- highlighting further the nuances involved in careful evaluation of LM toxicity.

Hate speech poses a significant threat to social harmony. Over the past two years, Indonesia has seen a ten-fold increase in the online hate speech ratio, underscoring the urgent need for effective detection mechanisms. However, progress is hindered by the limited availability of labeled data for Indonesian texts. The condition is even worse for marginalized minorities, such as Shia, LGBTQ, and other ethnic minorities because hate speech is underreported and less understood by detection tools. Furthermore, the lack of accommodation for subjectivity in current datasets compounds this issue. To address this, we introduce IndoToxic2024, a comprehensive Indonesian hate speech and toxicity classification dataset. Comprising 43,692 entries annotated by 19 diverse individuals, the dataset focuses on texts targeting vulnerable groups in Indonesia, specifically during the hottest political event in the country: the presidential election. We establish baselines for seven binary classification tasks, achieving a macro-F1 score of 0.78 with a BERT model (IndoBERTweet) fine-tuned for hate speech classification. Furthermore, we demonstrate how incorporating demographic information can enhance the zero-shot performance of the large language model, gpt-3.5-turbo. However, we also caution that an overemphasis on demographic information can negatively impact the fine-tuned model performance due to data fragmentation.

Language models can generate harmful and biased outputs and exhibit undesirable behavior according to a given cultural context. We propose a Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted Datasets, an iterative process to significantly change model behavior by crafting and fine-tuning on a dataset that reflects a predetermined set of target values. We evaluate our process using three metrics: quantitative metrics with human evaluations that score output adherence to a target value, toxicity scoring on outputs; and qualitative metrics analyzing the most common word associated with a given social category. Through each iteration, we add additional training dataset examples based on observed shortcomings from evaluations. PALMS performs significantly better on all metrics compared to baseline and control models for a broad range of GPT-3 language model sizes without compromising capability integrity. We find that the effectiveness of PALMS increases with model size. We show that significantly adjusting language model behavior is feasible with a small, hand-curated dataset.

The task of toxicity detection is still a relevant task, especially in the context of safe and fair LMs development. Nevertheless, labeled binary toxicity classification corpora are not available for all languages, which is understandable given the resource-intensive nature of the annotation process. Ukrainian, in particular, is among the languages lacking such resources. To our knowledge, there has been no existing toxicity classification corpus in Ukrainian. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by investigating cross-lingual knowledge transfer techniques and creating labeled corpora by: (i)~translating from an English corpus, (ii)~filtering toxic samples using keywords, and (iii)~annotating with crowdsourcing. We compare LLMs prompting and other cross-lingual transfer approaches with and without fine-tuning offering insights into the most robust and efficient baselines.

Perception of toxicity evolves over time and often differs between geographies and cultural backgrounds. Similarly, black-box commercially available APIs for detecting toxicity, such as the Perspective API, are not static, but frequently retrained to address any unattended weaknesses and biases. We evaluate the implications of these changes on the reproducibility of findings that compare the relative merits of models and methods that aim to curb toxicity. Our findings suggest that research that relied on inherited automatic toxicity scores to compare models and techniques may have resulted in inaccurate findings. Rescoring all models from HELM, a widely respected living benchmark, for toxicity with the recent version of the API led to a different ranking of widely used foundation models. We suggest caution in applying apples-to-apples comparisons between studies and lay recommendations for a more structured approach to evaluating toxicity over time. Code and data are available at https://github.com/for-ai/black-box-api-challenges.

Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) have permitted the synthesis and comprehension of coherent text in an open-ended way, therefore translating the theoretical algorithms into practical applications. The large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted businesses such as report summarization software and copywriters. Observations indicate, however, that LLMs may exhibit social prejudice and toxicity, posing ethical and societal dangers of consequences resulting from irresponsibility. Large-scale benchmarks for accountable LLMs should consequently be developed. Although several empirical investigations reveal the existence of a few ethical difficulties in advanced LLMs, there is little systematic examination and user study of the risks and harmful behaviors of current LLM usage. To further educate future efforts on constructing ethical LLMs responsibly, we perform a qualitative research method called ``red teaming'' on OpenAI's ChatGPTIn this paper, ChatGPT refers to the version released on Dec 15th. to better understand the practical features of ethical dangers in recent LLMs. We analyze ChatGPT comprehensively from four perspectives: 1) Bias 2) Reliability 3) Robustness 4) Toxicity. In accordance with our stated viewpoints, we empirically benchmark ChatGPT on multiple sample datasets. We find that a significant number of ethical risks cannot be addressed by existing benchmarks, and hence illustrate them via additional case studies. In addition, we examine the implications of our findings on AI ethics and harmal behaviors of ChatGPT, as well as future problems and practical design considerations for responsible LLMs. We believe that our findings may give light on future efforts to determine and mitigate the ethical hazards posed by machines in LLM applications.

Biased associations have been a challenge in the development of classifiers for detecting toxic language, hindering both fairness and accuracy. As potential solutions, we investigate recently introduced debiasing methods for text classification datasets and models, as applied to toxic language detection. Our focus is on lexical (e.g., swear words, slurs, identity mentions) and dialectal markers (specifically African American English). Our comprehensive experiments establish that existing methods are limited in their ability to prevent biased behavior in current toxicity detectors. We then propose an automatic, dialect-aware data correction method, as a proof-of-concept. Despite the use of synthetic labels, this method reduces dialectal associations with toxicity. Overall, our findings show that debiasing a model trained on biased toxic language data is not as effective as simply relabeling the data to remove existing biases.

This paper presents a dataset with over 3.3M threads and 134.5M posts from the Politically Incorrect board (/pol/) of the imageboard forum 4chan, posted over a period of almost 3.5 years (June 2016-November 2019). To the best of our knowledge, this represents the largest publicly available 4chan dataset, providing the community with an archive of posts that have been permanently deleted from 4chan and are otherwise inaccessible. We augment the data with a set of additional labels, including toxicity scores and the named entities mentioned in each post. We also present a statistical analysis of the dataset, providing an overview of what researchers interested in using it can expect, as well as a simple content analysis, shedding light on the most prominent discussion topics, the most popular entities mentioned, and the toxicity level of each post. Overall, we are confident that our work will motivate and assist researchers in studying and understanding 4chan, as well as its role on the greater Web. For instance, we hope this dataset may be used for cross-platform studies of social media, as well as being useful for other types of research like natural language processing. Finally, our dataset can assist qualitative work focusing on in-depth case studies of specific narratives, events, or social theories.

This paper presents Tiny-toxic-detector, a compact transformer-based model designed for toxic content detection. Despite having only 2.1 million parameters, Tiny-toxic-detector achieves competitive performance on benchmark datasets, with 90.97% accuracy on ToxiGen and 86.98% accuracy on the Jigsaw dataset, rivaling models over 50 times its size. This efficiency enables deployment in resource-constrained environments, addressing the need for effective content moderation tools that balance performance with computational efficiency. The model architecture features 4 transformer encoder layers, each with 2 attention heads, an embedding dimension of 64, and a feedforward dimension of 128. Trained on both public and private datasets, Tiny-toxic-detector demonstrates the potential of efficient, task-specific models for addressing online toxicity. The paper covers the model architecture, training process, performance benchmarks, and limitations, underscoring its suitability for applications such as social media monitoring and content moderation. By achieving results comparable to much larger models while significantly reducing computational demands, Tiny-toxic-detector represents progress toward more sustainable and scalable AI-driven content moderation solutions.

Toxicity remains a leading cause of early-stage drug development failure. Despite advances in molecular design and property prediction, the task of molecular toxicity repair - generating structurally valid molecular alternatives with reduced toxicity - has not yet been systematically defined or benchmarked. To fill this gap, we introduce ToxiMol, the first benchmark task for general-purpose Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) focused on molecular toxicity repair. We construct a standardized dataset covering 11 primary tasks and 560 representative toxic molecules spanning diverse mechanisms and granularities. We design a prompt annotation pipeline with mechanism-aware and task-adaptive capabilities, informed by expert toxicological knowledge. In parallel, we propose an automated evaluation framework, ToxiEval, which integrates toxicity endpoint prediction, synthetic accessibility, drug-likeness, and structural similarity into a high-throughput evaluation chain for repair success. We systematically assess nearly 30 mainstream general-purpose MLLMs and design multiple ablation studies to analyze key factors such as evaluation criteria, candidate diversity, and failure attribution. Experimental results show that although current MLLMs still face significant challenges on this task, they begin to demonstrate promising capabilities in toxicity understanding, semantic constraint adherence, and structure-aware molecule editing.

Not all topics are equally "flammable" in terms of toxicity: a calm discussion of turtles or fishing less often fuels inappropriate toxic dialogues than a discussion of politics or sexual minorities. We define a set of sensitive topics that can yield inappropriate and toxic messages and describe the methodology of collecting and labeling a dataset for appropriateness. While toxicity in user-generated data is well-studied, we aim at defining a more fine-grained notion of inappropriateness. The core of inappropriateness is that it can harm the reputation of a speaker. This is different from toxicity in two respects: (i) inappropriateness is topic-related, and (ii) inappropriate message is not toxic but still unacceptable. We collect and release two datasets for Russian: a topic-labeled dataset and an appropriateness-labeled dataset. We also release pre-trained classification models trained on this data.

Toxic language detection systems often falsely flag text that contains minority group mentions as toxic, as those groups are often the targets of online hate. Such over-reliance on spurious correlations also causes systems to struggle with detecting implicitly toxic language. To help mitigate these issues, we create ToxiGen, a new large-scale and machine-generated dataset of 274k toxic and benign statements about 13 minority groups. We develop a demonstration-based prompting framework and an adversarial classifier-in-the-loop decoding method to generate subtly toxic and benign text with a massive pretrained language model. Controlling machine generation in this way allows ToxiGen to cover implicitly toxic text at a larger scale, and about more demographic groups, than previous resources of human-written text. We conduct a human evaluation on a challenging subset of ToxiGen and find that annotators struggle to distinguish machine-generated text from human-written language. We also find that 94.5% of toxic examples are labeled as hate speech by human annotators. Using three publicly-available datasets, we show that finetuning a toxicity classifier on our data improves its performance on human-written data substantially. We also demonstrate that ToxiGen can be used to fight machine-generated toxicity as finetuning improves the classifier significantly on our evaluation subset. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/ToxiGen.

Generic `toxicity' classifiers continue to be used for evaluating the potential for harm in natural language generation, despite mounting evidence of their shortcomings. We consider the challenge of measuring misogyny in natural language generation, and argue that generic `toxicity' classifiers are inadequate for this task. We use data from two well-characterised `Incel' communities on Reddit that differ primarily in their degrees of misogyny to construct a pair of training corpora which we use to fine-tune two language models. We show that an open source `toxicity' classifier is unable to distinguish meaningfully between generations from these models. We contrast this with a misogyny-specific lexicon recently proposed by feminist subject-matter experts, demonstrating that, despite the limitations of simple lexicon-based approaches, this shows promise as a benchmark to evaluate language models for misogyny, and that it is sensitive enough to reveal the known differences in these Reddit communities. Our preliminary findings highlight the limitations of a generic approach to evaluating harms, and further emphasise the need for careful benchmark design and selection in natural language evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) are being adopted at remarkable speed, although their safety still remains a serious concern. With the advent of multilingual S/LLMs, the question now becomes a matter of scale: can we expand multilingual safety evaluations of these models with the same velocity at which they are deployed? To this end we introduce RTP-LX, a human-transcreated and human-annotated corpus of toxic prompts and outputs in 28 languages. RTP-LX follows participatory design practices, and a portion of the corpus is especially designed to detect culturally-specific toxic language. We evaluate seven S/LLMs on their ability to detect toxic content in a culturally-sensitive, multilingual scenario. We find that, although they typically score acceptably in terms of accuracy, they have low agreement with human judges when judging holistically the toxicity of a prompt, and have difficulty discerning harm in context-dependent scenarios, particularly with subtle-yet-harmful content (e.g. microagressions, bias). We release of this dataset to contribute to further reduce harmful uses of these models and improve their safe deployment.

The Multi-platform Aggregated Dataset of Online Communities (MADOC) is a comprehensive dataset that facilitates computational social science research by providing FAIR-compliant standardized access to cross-platform analysis of online social dynamics. MADOC aggregates and standardizes data from Bluesky, Koo, Reddit, and Voat (2012-2024), containing 18.9 million posts, 236 million comments, and 23.1 million unique users. The dataset enables comparative studies of toxic behavior evolution across platforms through standardized interaction records and sentiment analysis. By providing UUID-anonymized user histories and temporal alignment of banned communities' activity patterns, MADOC supports research on content moderation impacts and platform migration trends. Distributed via Zenodo with persistent identifiers and Python/R toolkits, the dataset adheres to FAIR principles while addressing post-API-era research challenges through ethical aggregation of public social media archives.

The primary goal of drug safety researchers and regulators is to promptly identify adverse drug reactions. Doing so may in turn prevent or reduce the harm to patients and ultimately improve public health. Evaluating and monitoring drug safety (i.e., pharmacovigilance) involves analyzing an ever growing collection of spontaneous reports from health professionals, physicians, and pharmacists, and information voluntarily submitted by patients. In this scenario, facilitating analysis of such reports via automation has the potential to rapidly identify safety signals. Unfortunately, public resources for developing natural language models for this task are scant. We present PHEE, a novel dataset for pharmacovigilance comprising over 5000 annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature, making it the largest such public dataset to date. We describe the hierarchical event schema designed to provide coarse and fine-grained information about patients' demographics, treatments and (side) effects. Along with the discussion of the dataset, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of current state-of-the-art approaches for biomedical event extraction, point out their limitations, and highlight open challenges to foster future research in this area.

Polarization is defined as divisive opinions held by two or more groups on substantive issues. As the world's third-largest democracy, Indonesia faces growing concerns about the interplay between political polarization and online toxicity, which is often directed at vulnerable minority groups. Despite the importance of this issue, previous NLP research has not fully explored the relationship between toxicity and polarization. To bridge this gap, we present a novel multi-label Indonesian dataset that incorporates toxicity, polarization, and annotator demographic information. Benchmarking this dataset using BERT-base models and large language models (LLMs) shows that polarization information enhances toxicity classification, and vice versa. Furthermore, providing demographic information significantly improves the performance of polarization classification.

High-throughput screening techniques are commonly used to obtain large quantities of data in many fields of biology. It is well known that artifacts arising from variability in the technical execution of different experimental batches within such screens confound these observations and can lead to invalid biological conclusions. It is therefore necessary to account for these batch effects when analyzing outcomes. In this paper we describe RxRx1, a biological dataset designed specifically for the systematic study of batch effect correction methods. The dataset consists of 125,510 high-resolution fluorescence microscopy images of human cells under 1,138 genetic perturbations in 51 experimental batches across 4 cell types. Visual inspection of the images alone clearly demonstrates significant batch effects. We propose a classification task designed to evaluate the effectiveness of experimental batch correction methods on these images and examine the performance of a number of correction methods on this task. Our goal in releasing RxRx1 is to encourage the development of effective experimental batch correction methods that generalize well to unseen experimental batches. The dataset can be downloaded at https://rxrx.ai.

The real-world impact of polarization and toxicity in the online sphere marked the end of 2020 and the beginning of this year in a negative way. Semeval-2021, Task 5 - Toxic Spans Detection is based on a novel annotation of a subset of the Jigsaw Unintended Bias dataset and is the first language toxicity detection task dedicated to identifying the toxicity-level spans. For this task, participants had to automatically detect character spans in short comments that render the message as toxic. Our model considers applying Virtual Adversarial Training in a semi-supervised setting during the fine-tuning process of several Transformer-based models (i.e., BERT and RoBERTa), in combination with Conditional Random Fields. Our approach leads to performance improvements and more robust models, enabling us to achieve an F1-score of 65.73% in the official submission and an F1-score of 66.13% after further tuning during post-evaluation.

Considerable effort has been dedicated to mitigating toxicity, but existing methods often require drastic modifications to model parameters or the use of computationally intensive auxiliary models. Furthermore, previous approaches have often neglected the crucial factor of language's evolving nature over time. In this work, we present a comprehensive perspective on toxicity mitigation that takes into account its changing nature. We introduce Goodtriever, a flexible methodology that matches the current state-of-the-art toxicity mitigation while achieving 43% relative latency reduction during inference and being more computationally efficient. By incorporating a retrieval-based approach at decoding time, Goodtriever enables toxicity-controlled text generation. Our research advocates for an increased focus on adaptable mitigation techniques, which better reflect the data drift models face when deployed in the wild. Code and data are available at https://github.com/for-ai/goodtriever.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini have significantly advanced natural language processing, enabling various applications such as chatbots and automated content generation. However, these models can be exploited by malicious individuals who craft toxic prompts to elicit harmful or unethical responses. These individuals often employ jailbreaking techniques to bypass safety mechanisms, highlighting the need for robust toxic prompt detection methods. Existing detection techniques, both blackbox and whitebox, face challenges related to the diversity of toxic prompts, scalability, and computational efficiency. In response, we propose ToxicDetector, a lightweight greybox method designed to efficiently detect toxic prompts in LLMs. ToxicDetector leverages LLMs to create toxic concept prompts, uses embedding vectors to form feature vectors, and employs a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier for prompt classification. Our evaluation on various versions of the LLama models, Gemma-2, and multiple datasets demonstrates that ToxicDetector achieves a high accuracy of 96.39\% and a low false positive rate of 2.00\%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ToxicDetector's processing time of 0.0780 seconds per prompt makes it highly suitable for real-time applications. ToxicDetector achieves high accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, making it a practical method for toxic prompt detection in LLMs.

Prior works on detoxification are scattered in the sense that they do not cover all aspects of detoxification needed in a real-world scenario. Notably, prior works restrict the task of developing detoxification models to only a seen subset of platforms, leaving the question of how the models would perform on unseen platforms unexplored. Additionally, these works do not address non-detoxifiability, a phenomenon whereby the toxic text cannot be detoxified without altering the meaning. We propose GreenLLaMA, the first comprehensive end-to-end detoxification framework, which attempts to alleviate the aforementioned limitations. We first introduce a cross-platform pseudo-parallel corpus applying multi-step data processing and generation strategies leveraging ChatGPT. We then train a suite of detoxification models with our cross-platform corpus. We show that our detoxification models outperform the SoTA model trained with human-annotated parallel corpus. We further introduce explanation to promote transparency and trustworthiness. GreenLLaMA additionally offers a unique paraphrase detector especially dedicated for the detoxification task to tackle the non-detoxifiable cases. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our cross-platform corpus and the robustness of GreenLLaMA against adversarial toxicity.

Recent alignment algorithms such as direct preference optimization (DPO) have been developed to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs) by training these models to match human behaviors exemplified by preference data. However, these methods are both computationally intensive and lacking in controllability and transparency, making them prone to jailbreaking and inhibiting their widespread use. Furthermore, these tuning-based methods require large-scale preference data for training and are susceptible to noisy preference data. In this paper, we introduce a tuning-free alignment alternative (DeTox) and demonstrate its effectiveness under the use case of toxicity reduction. Grounded on theory from factor analysis, DeTox is a sample-efficient model editing approach that identifies a toxic subspace in the model parameter space and reduces model toxicity by projecting away the detected subspace. The toxic sub-space is identified by extracting preference data embeddings from the language model, and removing non-toxic information from these embeddings. We show that DeTox is more sample-efficient than DPO, further showcasing greater robustness to noisy data. Finally, we establish both theoretical and empirical connections between DeTox and DPO, showing that DeTox can be interpreted as a denoised version of a single DPO step.

As generative large language models (LLMs) grow more performant and prevalent, we must develop comprehensive enough tools to measure and improve their fairness. Different prompt-based datasets can be used to measure social bias across multiple text domains and demographic axes, meaning that testing LLMs on more datasets can potentially help us characterize their biases more fully, and better ensure equal and equitable treatment of marginalized demographic groups. In this work, our focus is two-fold: (1) Benchmarking: a comparison of 6 different prompt-based bias and toxicity metrics across 12 demographic axes and 5 families of generative LLMs. Out of those 6 metrics, AdvPromptSet and HolisticBiasR are novel datasets proposed in the paper. The comparison of those benchmarks gives us insights about the bias and toxicity of the compared models. Therefore, we explore the frequency of demographic terms in common LLM pre-training corpora and how this may relate to model biases. (2) Mitigation: we conduct a comprehensive study of how well 3 bias/toxicity mitigation techniques perform across our suite of measurements. ROBBIE aims to provide insights for practitioners while deploying a model, emphasizing the need to not only measure potential harms, but also understand how they arise by characterizing the data, mitigate harms once found, and balance any trade-offs. We open-source our analysis code in hopes of encouraging broader measurements of bias in future LLMs.

The detection of sensitive content in large datasets is crucial for ensuring that shared and analysed data is free from harmful material. However, current moderation tools, such as external APIs, suffer from limitations in customisation, accuracy across diverse sensitive categories, and privacy concerns. Additionally, existing datasets and open-source models focus predominantly on toxic language, leaving gaps in detecting other sensitive categories such as substance abuse or self-harm. In this paper, we put forward a unified dataset tailored for social media content moderation across six sensitive categories: conflictual language, profanity, sexually explicit material, drug-related content, self-harm, and spam. By collecting and annotating data with consistent retrieval strategies and guidelines, we address the shortcomings of previous focalised research. Our analysis demonstrates that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on this novel dataset yields significant improvements in detection performance compared to open off-the-shelf models such as LLaMA, and even proprietary OpenAI models, which underperform by 10-15% overall. This limitation is even more pronounced on popular moderation APIs, which cannot be easily tailored to specific sensitive content categories, among others.

To address the risks of encountering inappropriate or harmful content, researchers managed to incorporate several harmful contents datasets with machine learning methods to detect harmful concepts. However, existing harmful datasets are curated by the presence of a narrow range of harmful objects, and only cover real harmful content sources. This hinders the generalizability of methods based on such datasets, potentially leading to misjudgments. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive harmful dataset, Visual Harmful Dataset 11K (VHD11K), consisting of 10,000 images and 1,000 videos, crawled from the Internet and generated by 4 generative models, across a total of 10 harmful categories covering a full spectrum of harmful concepts with nontrivial definition. We also propose a novel annotation framework by formulating the annotation process as a multi-agent Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, having 3 different VLMs "debate" about whether the given image/video is harmful, and incorporating the in-context learning strategy in the debating process. Therefore, we can ensure that the VLMs consider the context of the given image/video and both sides of the arguments thoroughly before making decisions, further reducing the likelihood of misjudgments in edge cases. Evaluation and experimental results demonstrate that (1) the great alignment between the annotation from our novel annotation framework and those from human, ensuring the reliability of VHD11K; (2) our full-spectrum harmful dataset successfully identifies the inability of existing harmful content detection methods to detect extensive harmful contents and improves the performance of existing harmfulness recognition methods; (3) VHD11K outperforms the baseline dataset, SMID, as evidenced by the superior improvement in harmfulness recognition methods. The complete dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/nctu-eva-lab/VHD11K.

During the development of large language models (LLMs), pre-training data play a critical role in shaping LLMs' capabilities. In recent years several large-scale and high-quality pre-training datasets have been released to accelerate the research of LLMs, including ChineseWebText1.0, C4, Pile, WanJuan, MAPCC and others. However, as LLMs continue to evolve, focus has increasingly shifted to domain-specific capabilities and safety concerns, making those previous coarse-grained texts insufficient for meeting training requirements. Furthermore, fine-grained information, such as quality, domain and toxicity, is becoming increasingly important in building powerful and reliable LLMs for various scenarios. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a new tool-chain called MDFG-tool for constructing large-scale and high-quality Chinese datasets with multi-dimensional and fine-grained information. First, we employ manually crafted rules to discard explicit noisy texts from raw contents. Second, the quality evaluation model, domain classifier, and toxicity evaluation model are well-designed to assess the remaining cleaned data respectively. Finally, we integrate these three types of fine-grained information for each text. With this approach, we release the largest, high-quality and fine-grained Chinese text ChineseWebText2.0, which consists of 3.8TB and each text is associated with a quality score, domain labels, a toxicity label and a toxicity score, facilitating the LLM researchers to select data based on various types of fine-grained information. The data, codes and the tool-chain are available on this website https://github.com/CASIA-LM/ChineseWebText-2.0

High Content Screening (HCS) microscopy datasets have transformed the ability to profile cellular responses to genetic and chemical perturbations, enabling cell-based inference of drug-target interactions (DTI). However, the adoption of representation learning methods for HCS data has been hindered by the lack of accessible datasets and robust benchmarks. To address this gap, we present RxRx3-core, a curated and compressed subset of the RxRx3 dataset, and an associated DTI benchmarking task. At just 18GB, RxRx3-core significantly reduces the size barrier associated with large-scale HCS datasets while preserving critical data necessary for benchmarking representation learning models against a zero-shot DTI prediction task. RxRx3-core includes 222,601 microscopy images spanning 736 CRISPR knockouts and 1,674 compounds at 8 concentrations. RxRx3-core is available on HuggingFace and Polaris, along with pre-trained embeddings and benchmarking code, ensuring accessibility for the research community. By providing a compact dataset and robust benchmarks, we aim to accelerate innovation in representation learning methods for HCS data and support the discovery of novel biological insights.

Controlled Text Generation (CTG) aims to produce texts that exhibit specific desired attributes. In this study, we introduce a pluggable CTG framework for Large Language Models (LLMs) named Dynamic Attribute Graphs-based controlled text generation (DATG). This framework utilizes an attribute scorer to evaluate the attributes of sentences generated by LLMs and constructs dynamic attribute graphs. DATG modulates the occurrence of key attribute words and key anti-attribute words, achieving effective attribute control without compromising the original capabilities of the model. We conduct experiments across four datasets in two tasks: toxicity mitigation and sentiment transformation, employing five LLMs as foundational models. Our findings highlight a remarkable enhancement in control accuracy, achieving a peak improvement of 19.29% over baseline methods in the most favorable task across four datasets. Additionally, we observe a significant decrease in perplexity, markedly improving text fluency.

While large-scale language models (LMs) are able to imitate the distribution of natural language well enough to generate realistic text, it is difficult to control which regions of the distribution they generate. This is especially problematic because datasets used for training large LMs usually contain significant toxicity, hate, bias, and negativity. We propose GeDi as an efficient method for using smaller LMs as generative discriminators to guide generation from large LMs to make them safer and more controllable. GeDi guides generation at each step by computing classification probabilities for all possible next tokens via Bayes rule by normalizing over two class-conditional distributions; one conditioned on the desired attribute, or control code, and another conditioned on the undesired attribute, or anti control code. We find that GeDi gives stronger controllability than the state of the art method while also achieving generation speeds more than 30 times faster. Additionally, training GeDi on only four topics allows us to controllably generate new topics zero-shot from just a keyword, unlocking a new capability that previous controllable generation methods do not have. Lastly, we show that GeDi can make GPT-2 (1.5B parameters) significantly less toxic without sacrificing linguistic quality, making it by far the most practical existing method for detoxifying large language models while maintaining a fast generation speed.

Ambient air pollution remains a critical issue in the United Kingdom, where data on air pollution concentrations form the foundation for interventions aimed at improving air quality. However, the current air pollution monitoring station network in the UK is characterized by spatial sparsity, heterogeneous placement, and frequent temporal data gaps, often due to issues such as power outages. We introduce a scalable data-driven supervised machine learning model framework designed to address temporal and spatial data gaps by filling missing measurements. This approach provides a comprehensive dataset for England throughout 2018 at a 1kmx1km hourly resolution. Leveraging machine learning techniques and real-world data from the sparsely distributed monitoring stations, we generate 355,827 synthetic monitoring stations across the study area, yielding data valued at approximately \pounds70 billion. Validation was conducted to assess the model's performance in forecasting, estimating missing locations, and capturing peak concentrations. The resulting dataset is of particular interest to a diverse range of stakeholders engaged in downstream assessments supported by outdoor air pollution concentration data for NO2, O3, PM10, PM2.5, and SO2. This resource empowers stakeholders to conduct studies at a higher resolution than was previously possible.

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain difficult to evaluate comprehensively, particularly for languages other than English, where high-quality data is often limited. Existing benchmarks and leaderboards are predominantly English-centric, with only a few addressing other languages. These benchmarks fall short in several key areas: they overlook the diversity of language varieties, prioritize fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities over tasks of industrial relevance, and are static. With these aspects in mind, we present IberBench, a comprehensive and extensible benchmark designed to assess LLM performance on both fundamental and industry-relevant NLP tasks, in languages spoken across the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero-America. IberBench integrates 101 datasets from evaluation campaigns and recent benchmarks, covering 22 task categories such as sentiment and emotion analysis, toxicity detection, and summarization. The benchmark addresses key limitations in current evaluation practices, such as the lack of linguistic diversity and static evaluation setups by enabling continual updates and community-driven model and dataset submissions moderated by a committee of experts. We evaluate 23 LLMs ranging from 100 million to 14 billion parameters and provide empirical insights into their strengths and limitations. Our findings indicate that (i) LLMs perform worse on industry-relevant tasks than in fundamental ones, (ii) performance is on average lower for Galician and Basque, (iii) some tasks show results close to random, and (iv) in other tasks LLMs perform above random but below shared task systems. IberBench offers open-source implementations for the entire evaluation pipeline, including dataset normalization and hosting, incremental evaluation of LLMs, and a publicly accessible leaderboard.

Current benchmarks for assessing vision-language models (VLMs) often focus on their perception or problem-solving capabilities and neglect other critical aspects such as fairness, multilinguality, or toxicity. Furthermore, they differ in their evaluation procedures and the scope of the evaluation, making it difficult to compare models. To address these issues, we extend the HELM framework to VLMs to present the Holistic Evaluation of Vision Language Models (VHELM). VHELM aggregates various datasets to cover one or more of the 9 aspects: visual perception, knowledge, reasoning, bias, fairness, multilinguality, robustness, toxicity, and safety. In doing so, we produce a comprehensive, multi-dimensional view of the capabilities of the VLMs across these important factors. In addition, we standardize the standard inference parameters, methods of prompting, and evaluation metrics to enable fair comparisons across models. Our framework is designed to be lightweight and automatic so that evaluation runs are cheap and fast. Our initial run evaluates 22 VLMs on 21 existing datasets to provide a holistic snapshot of the models. We uncover new key findings, such as the fact that efficiency-focused models (e.g., Claude 3 Haiku or Gemini 1.5 Flash) perform significantly worse than their full models (e.g., Claude 3 Opus or Gemini 1.5 Pro) on the bias benchmark but not when evaluated on the other aspects. For transparency, we release the raw model generations and complete results on our website (https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/vhelm/v2.0.1). VHELM is intended to be a living benchmark, and we hope to continue adding new datasets and models over time.

Added toxicity in the context of translation refers to the fact of producing a translation output with more toxicity than there exists in the input. In this paper, we present MinTox which is a novel pipeline to identify added toxicity and mitigate this issue which works at inference time. MinTox uses a toxicity detection classifier which is multimodal (speech and text) and works in languages at scale. The mitigation method is applied to languages at scale and directly in text outputs. MinTox is applied to SEAMLESSM4T, which is the latest multimodal and massively multilingual machine translation system. For this system, MinTox achieves significant added toxicity mitigation across domains, modalities and language directions. MinTox manages to approximately filter out from 25% to 95% of added toxicity (depending on the modality and domain) while keeping translation quality.

Researchers and developers increasingly rely on toxicity scoring to moderate generative language model outputs, in settings such as customer service, information retrieval, and content generation. However, toxicity scoring may render pertinent information inaccessible, rigidify or "value-lock" cultural norms, and prevent language reclamation processes, particularly for marginalized people. In this work, we extend the concept of algorithmic recourse to generative language models: we provide users a novel mechanism to achieve their desired prediction by dynamically setting thresholds for toxicity filtering. Users thereby exercise increased agency relative to interactions with the baseline system. A pilot study (n = 30) supports the potential of our proposed recourse mechanism, indicating improvements in usability compared to fixed-threshold toxicity-filtering of model outputs. Future work should explore the intersection of toxicity scoring, model controllability, user agency, and language reclamation processes -- particularly with regard to the bias that many communities encounter when interacting with generative language models.

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

In this work, we present the ChemNLP library that can be used for 1) curating open access datasets for materials and chemistry literature, developing and comparing traditional machine learning, transformers and graph neural network models for 2) classifying and clustering texts, 3) named entity recognition for large-scale text-mining, 4) abstractive summarization for generating titles of articles from abstracts, 5) text generation for suggesting abstracts from titles, 6) integration with density functional theory dataset for identifying potential candidate materials such as superconductors, and 7) web-interface development for text and reference query. We primarily use the publicly available arXiv and Pubchem datasets but the tools can be used for other datasets as well. Moreover, as new models are developed, they can be easily integrated in the library. ChemNLP is available at the websites: https://github.com/usnistgov/chemnlp and https://jarvis.nist.gov/jarvischemnlp.

AI-driven discovery can greatly reduce design time and enhance new therapeutics' effectiveness. Models using simulators explore broad design spaces but risk violating implicit constraints due to a lack of experimental priors. For example, in a new analysis we performed on a diverse set of models on the GuacaMol benchmark using supervised classifiers, over 60\% of molecules proposed had high probability of being mutagenic. In this work, we introduce \ourdataset, a dataset of priors for design problems extracted from literature describing compounds used in lab settings. It is constructed with LLM pipelines for discovering therapeutic entities in relevant paragraphs and summarizing information in concise fair-use facts. \ourdataset~ consists of 32.3 million pairs of natural language facts, and appropriate entity representations (i.e. SMILES or refseq IDs). To demonstrate the potential of the data, we train LLM, CLIP, and LLava architectures to reason jointly about text and design targets and evaluate on tasks from the Therapeutic Data Commons (TDC). \ourdataset~is highly effective for creating models with strong priors: in supervised prediction problems that use our data as pretraining, our best models with 15M learnable parameters outperform larger 2B TxGemma on both regression and classification TDC tasks, and perform comparably to 9B models on average. Models built with \ourdataset~can be used as constraints while optimizing for novel molecules in GuacaMol, resulting in proposals that are safer and nearly as effective. We release our dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/medexanon/Medex{huggingface.co/datasets/medexanon/Medex}, and will provide expanded versions as available literature grows.

The fact that everyone with a social media account can create and share content, and the increasing public reliance on social media platforms as a news and information source bring about significant challenges such as misinformation, fake news, harmful content, etc. Although human content moderation may be useful to an extent and used by these platforms to flag posted materials, the use of AI models provides a more sustainable, scalable, and effective way to mitigate these harmful contents. However, low-resourced languages such as the Somali language face limitations in AI automation, including scarce annotated training datasets and lack of language models tailored to their unique linguistic characteristics. This paper presents part of our ongoing research work to bridge some of these gaps for the Somali language. In particular, we created two human-annotated social-media-sourced Somali datasets for two downstream applications, fake news \& toxicity classification, and developed a transformer-based monolingual Somali language model (named SomBERTa) -- the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. SomBERTa is then fine-tuned and evaluated on toxic content, fake news and news topic classification datasets. Comparative evaluation analysis of the proposed model against related multilingual models (e.g., AfriBERTa, AfroXLMR, etc) demonstrated that SomBERTa consistently outperformed these comparators in both fake news and toxic content classification tasks while achieving the best average accuracy (87.99%) across all tasks. This research contributes to Somali NLP by offering a foundational language model and a replicable framework for other low-resource languages, promoting digital and AI inclusivity and linguistic diversity.

To ensure safe usage, Large Language Models (LLMs) typically undergo alignment with human-defined values. However, this alignment often relies on primarily English data and is biased towards Western-centric values, limiting its effectiveness in low-resource language settings. In this paper, we describe our approach for aligning SEA-Lion-v2.1-Instruct (a Llama3-8B variant) to minimize toxicity in Singlish, an English creole specific to Singapore. We find that supervised fine-tuning and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) on paired and unpaired preferences is more sample efficient and yields significantly better results than Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Our analysis reveals that DPO implicitly enforces a weaker safety objective than KTO, and that SFT complements KTO by improving training stability. Finally, we introduce a simple but novel modification to KTO, KTO-S, which improves training stability through better gradient exploitation. Overall, we present a general approach for safety alignment conducive to low-resource English languages, successfully reducing toxicity by 99\% on our Singlish benchmark, with gains generalizing to the broader TOXIGEN dataset while maintaining strong performance across standard LLM benchmarks.

The rapid advancement in artificial intelligence and natural language processing has led to the development of large-scale datasets aimed at benchmarking the performance of machine learning models. Herein, we introduce 'RetChemQA,' a comprehensive benchmark dataset designed to evaluate the capabilities of such models in the domain of reticular chemistry. This dataset includes both single-hop and multi-hop question-answer pairs, encompassing approximately 45,000 Q&As for each type. The questions have been extracted from an extensive corpus of literature containing about 2,530 research papers from publishers including NAS, ACS, RSC, Elsevier, and Nature Publishing Group, among others. The dataset has been generated using OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo, a cutting-edge model known for its exceptional language understanding and generation capabilities. In addition to the Q&A dataset, we also release a dataset of synthesis conditions extracted from the corpus of literature used in this study. The aim of RetChemQA is to provide a robust platform for the development and evaluation of advanced machine learning algorithms, particularly for the reticular chemistry community. The dataset is structured to reflect the complexities and nuances of real-world scientific discourse, thereby enabling nuanced performance assessments across a variety of tasks. The dataset is available at the following link: https://github.com/nakulrampal/RetChemQA

Catalyst discovery and optimization is key to solving many societal and energy challenges including solar fuels synthesis, long-term energy storage, and renewable fertilizer production. Despite considerable effort by the catalysis community to apply machine learning models to the computational catalyst discovery process, it remains an open challenge to build models that can generalize across both elemental compositions of surfaces and adsorbate identity/configurations, perhaps because datasets have been smaller in catalysis than related fields. To address this we developed the OC20 dataset, consisting of 1,281,040 Density Functional Theory (DFT) relaxations (~264,890,000 single point evaluations) across a wide swath of materials, surfaces, and adsorbates (nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen chemistries). We supplemented this dataset with randomly perturbed structures, short timescale molecular dynamics, and electronic structure analyses. The dataset comprises three central tasks indicative of day-to-day catalyst modeling and comes with pre-defined train/validation/test splits to facilitate direct comparisons with future model development efforts. We applied three state-of-the-art graph neural network models (CGCNN, SchNet, Dimenet++) to each of these tasks as baseline demonstrations for the community to build on. In almost every task, no upper limit on model size was identified, suggesting that even larger models are likely to improve on initial results. The dataset and baseline models are both provided as open resources, as well as a public leader board to encourage community contributions to solve these important tasks.

Evaluations of audio-language models (ALMs) -- multimodal models that take interleaved audio and text as input and output text -- are hindered by the lack of standardized benchmarks; most benchmarks measure only one or two capabilities and omit evaluative aspects such as fairness or safety. Furthermore, comparison across models is difficult as separate evaluations test a limited number of models and use different prompting methods and inference parameters. To address these shortfalls, we introduce AHELM, a benchmark that aggregates various datasets -- including 2 new synthetic audio-text datasets called PARADE, which evaluates the ALMs on avoiding stereotypes, and CoRe-Bench, which measures reasoning over conversational audio through inferential multi-turn question answering -- to holistically measure the performance of ALMs across 10 aspects we have identified as important to the development and usage of ALMs: audio perception, knowledge, reasoning, emotion detection, bias, fairness, multilinguality, robustness, toxicity, and safety. We also standardize the prompts, inference parameters, and evaluation metrics to ensure equitable comparisons across models. We test 14 open-weight and closed-API ALMs from 3 developers and 3 additional simple baseline systems each consisting of an automatic speech recognizer and a language model. Our results show that while Gemini 2.5 Pro ranks top in 5 out of 10 aspects, it exhibits group unfairness (p=0.01) on ASR tasks whereas most of the other models do not. We also find that the baseline systems perform reasonably well on AHELM, with one ranking 5th overall despite having only speech-to-text capabilities. For transparency, all raw prompts, model generations, and outputs are available on our website at https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/audio/v1.0.0. AHELM is intended to be a living benchmark and new datasets and models will be added over time.

We present two novel unsupervised methods for eliminating toxicity in text. Our first method combines two recent ideas: (1) guidance of the generation process with small style-conditional language models and (2) use of paraphrasing models to perform style transfer. We use a well-performing paraphraser guided by style-trained language models to keep the text content and remove toxicity. Our second method uses BERT to replace toxic words with their non-offensive synonyms. We make the method more flexible by enabling BERT to replace mask tokens with a variable number of words. Finally, we present the first large-scale comparative study of style transfer models on the task of toxicity removal. We compare our models with a number of methods for style transfer. The models are evaluated in a reference-free way using a combination of unsupervised style transfer metrics. Both methods we suggest yield new SOTA results.

Accurate thermochemical data with sub-chemical accuracy (i.e., within pm1 kcal mol^{-1} from sufficiently accurate experimental or theoretical reference data) is essential for the development and improvement of computational chemistry methods. Challenging thermochemical properties such as heats of formation and total atomization energies (TAEs) are of particular interest because they rigorously test the ability of computational chemistry methods to accurately describe complex chemical transformations involving multiple bond rearrangements. Yet, existing thermochemical datasets that confidently reach this level of accuracy are limited in either size or scope. Datasets with highly accurate reference values include a small number of data points, and larger datasets provide less accurate data or only cover a narrow portion of the chemical space. The existing datasets are therefore insufficient for developing data-driven methods with predictive accuracy over a large chemical space. The Microsoft Research Accurate Chemistry Collection (MSR-ACC) will address this challenge. Here, it offers the MSR-ACC/TAE25 dataset of 76,879 total atomization energies obtained at the CCSD(T)/CBS level via the W1-F12 thermochemical protocol. The dataset is constructed to exhaustively cover chemical space for all elements up to argon by enumerating and sampling chemical graphs, thus avoiding bias towards any particular subspace of the chemical space (such as drug-like, organic, or experimentally observed molecules). With this first dataset in MSR-ACC, we enable data-driven approaches for developing predictive computational chemistry methods with unprecedented accuracy and scope.

Adverse drug events (ADEs) significantly impact clinical research, causing many clinical trial failures. ADE prediction is key for developing safer medications and enhancing patient outcomes. To support this effort, we introduce CT-ADE, a dataset for multilabel predictive modeling of ADEs in monopharmacy treatments. CT-ADE integrates data from 2,497 unique drugs, encompassing 168,984 drug-ADE pairs extracted from clinical trials, annotated with patient and contextual information, and comprehensive ADE concepts standardized across multiple levels of the MedDRA ontology. Preliminary analyses with large language models (LLMs) achieved F1-scores up to 55.90%. Models using patient and contextual information showed F1-score improvements of 21%-38% over models using only chemical structure data. Our results highlight the importance of target population and treatment regimens in the predictive modeling of ADEs, offering greater performance gains than LLM domain specialization and scaling. CT-ADE provides an essential tool for researchers aiming to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance patient safety and minimize the impact of ADEs on pharmaceutical research and development. The dataset is publicly accessible at https://github.com/ds4dh/CT-ADE.

In recent years, the widespread use of social media has led to an increase in the generation of toxic and offensive content on online platforms. In response, social media platforms have worked on developing automatic detection methods and employing human moderators to cope with this deluge of offensive content. While various state-of-the-art statistical models have been applied to detect toxic posts, there are only a few studies that focus on detecting the words or expressions that make a post offensive. This motivates the organization of the SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection competition, which has provided participants with a dataset containing toxic spans annotation in English posts. In this paper, we present the WLV-RIT entry for the SemEval-2021 Task 5. Our best performing neural transformer model achieves an 0.68 F1-Score. Furthermore, we develop an open-source framework for multilingual detection of offensive spans, i.e., MUDES, based on neural transformers that detect toxic spans in texts.

The development of robust safety benchmarks for large language models requires open, reproducible datasets that can measure both appropriate refusal of harmful content and potential over-restriction of legitimate scientific discourse. We present an open-source dataset and testing framework for evaluating LLM safety mechanisms across mainly controlled substance queries, analyzing four major models' responses to systematically varied prompts. Our results reveal distinct safety profiles: Claude-3.5-sonnet demonstrated the most conservative approach with 73% refusals and 27% allowances, while Mistral attempted to answer 100% of queries. GPT-3.5-turbo showed moderate restriction with 10% refusals and 90% allowances, and Grok-2 registered 20% refusals and 80% allowances. Testing prompt variation strategies revealed decreasing response consistency, from 85% with single prompts to 65% with five variations. This publicly available benchmark enables systematic evaluation of the critical balance between necessary safety restrictions and potential over-censorship of legitimate scientific inquiry, while providing a foundation for measuring progress in AI safety implementation. Chain-of-thought analysis reveals potential vulnerabilities in safety mechanisms, highlighting the complexity of implementing robust safeguards without unduly restricting desirable and valid scientific discourse.

The rapid expansion of chemistry literature poses significant challenges for researchers seeking to efficiently access domain-specific knowledge. To support advancements in chemistry-focused natural language processing (NLP), we present ChemRxivQuest, a curated dataset of 970 high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs derived from 155 ChemRxiv preprints across 17 subfields of chemistry. Each QA pair is explicitly linked to its source text segment to ensure traceability and contextual accuracy. ChemRxivQuest was constructed using an automated pipeline that combines optical character recognition (OCR), GPT-4o-based QA generation, and a fuzzy matching technique for answer verification. The dataset emphasizes conceptual, mechanistic, applied, and experimental questions, enabling applications in retrieval-based QA systems, search engine development, and fine-tuning of domain-adapted large language models. We analyze the dataset's structure, coverage, and limitations, and outline future directions for expansion and expert validation. ChemRxivQuest provides a foundational resource for chemistry NLP research, education, and tool development.

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) play an essential role in summarising, synthesising and validating scientific evidence. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques to automate the identification of relevant studies for SLRs. However, the lack of standardised evaluation datasets makes comparing the performance of such automated literature screening systems difficult. In this paper, we analyse the citation screening evaluation datasets, revealing that many of the available datasets are either too small, suffer from data leakage or have limited applicability to systems treating automated literature screening as a classification task, as opposed to, for example, a retrieval or question-answering task. To address these challenges, we introduce CSMeD, a meta-dataset consolidating nine publicly released collections, providing unified access to 325 SLRs from the fields of medicine and computer science. CSMeD serves as a comprehensive resource for training and evaluating the performance of automated citation screening models. Additionally, we introduce CSMeD-FT, a new dataset designed explicitly for evaluating the full text publication screening task. To demonstrate the utility of CSMeD, we conduct experiments and establish baselines on new datasets.

Toxicity in digital media poses significant challenges, yet little attention has been given to its dynamics within the rapidly growing medium of podcasts. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing political podcast data to study the emergence and propagation of toxicity, focusing on conversation chains-structured reply patterns within podcast transcripts. Leveraging state-of-the-art transcription models and advanced conversational analysis techniques, we systematically examine toxic discourse in over 30 popular political podcasts in the United States. Our key contributions include: (1) creating a comprehensive dataset of transcribed and diarized political podcasts, identifying thousands of toxic instances using Google's Perspective API, (2) uncovering concerning trends where a majority of episodes contain at least one toxic instance, (3) introducing toxic conversation chains and analyzing their structural and linguistic properties, revealing characteristics such as longer durations, repetitive patterns, figurative language, and emotional cues tied to anger and annoyance, (4) identifying demand-related words like 'want', 'like', and 'know' as precursors to toxicity, and (5) developing predictive models to anticipate toxicity shifts based on annotated change points. Our findings provide critical insights into podcast toxicity and establish a foundation for future research on real-time monitoring and intervention mechanisms to foster healthier discourse in this influential medium.

Foundation models have shown remarkable success across scientific domains, yet their impact in chemistry remains limited due to the absence of diverse, large-scale, high-quality datasets that reflect the field's multifaceted nature. We present the ChemPile, an open dataset containing over 75 billion tokens of curated chemical data, specifically built for training and evaluating general-purpose models in the chemical sciences. The dataset mirrors the human learning journey through chemistry -- from educational foundations to specialized expertise -- spanning multiple modalities and content types including structured data in diverse chemical representations (SMILES, SELFIES, IUPAC names, InChI, molecular renderings), scientific and educational text, executable code, and chemical images. ChemPile integrates foundational knowledge (textbooks, lecture notes), specialized expertise (scientific articles and language-interfaced data), visual understanding (molecular structures, diagrams), and advanced reasoning (problem-solving traces and code) -- mirroring how human chemists develop expertise through diverse learning materials and experiences. Constructed through hundreds of hours of expert curation, the ChemPile captures both foundational concepts and domain-specific complexity. We provide standardized training, validation, and test splits, enabling robust benchmarking. ChemPile is openly released via HuggingFace with a consistent API, permissive license, and detailed documentation. We hope the ChemPile will serve as a catalyst for chemical AI, enabling the development of the next generation of chemical foundation models.

The rise of social media has led to the increasing of comments on online forums. However, there still exists invalid comments which are not informative for users. Moreover, those comments are also quite toxic and harmful to people. In this paper, we create a dataset for constructive and toxic speech detection, named UIT-ViCTSD (Vietnamese Constructive and Toxic Speech Detection dataset) with 10,000 human-annotated comments. For these tasks, we propose a system for constructive and toxic speech detection with the state-of-the-art transfer learning model in Vietnamese NLP as PhoBERT. With this system, we obtain F1-scores of 78.59% and 59.40% for classifying constructive and toxic comments, respectively. Besides, we implement various baseline models as traditional Machine Learning and Deep Neural Network-Based models to evaluate the dataset. With the results, we can solve several tasks on the online discussions and develop the framework for identifying constructiveness and toxicity of Vietnamese social media comments automatically.

The mining of adverse drug events (ADEs) is pivotal in pharmacovigilance, enhancing patient safety by identifying potential risks associated with medications, facilitating early detection of adverse events, and guiding regulatory decision-making. Traditional ADE detection methods are reliable but slow, not easily adaptable to large-scale operations, and offer limited information. With the exponential increase in data sources like social media content, biomedical literature, and Electronic Medical Records (EMR), extracting relevant ADE-related information from these unstructured texts is imperative. Previous ADE mining studies have focused on text-based methodologies, overlooking visual cues, limiting contextual comprehension, and hindering accurate interpretation. To address this gap, we present a MultiModal Adverse Drug Event (MMADE) detection dataset, merging ADE-related textual information with visual aids. Additionally, we introduce a framework that leverages the capabilities of LLMs and VLMs for ADE detection by generating detailed descriptions of medical images depicting ADEs, aiding healthcare professionals in visually identifying adverse events. Using our MMADE dataset, we showcase the significance of integrating visual cues from images to enhance overall performance. This approach holds promise for patient safety, ADE awareness, and healthcare accessibility, paving the way for further exploration in personalized healthcare.

Large language models are increasingly trained on all the data ever produced by humans. Many have raised concerns about the trustworthiness of public benchmarks due to potential contamination in pre-training or fine-tuning datasets. While most data decontamination efforts apply string matching (e.g., n-gram overlap) to remove benchmark data, we show that these methods are insufficient, and simple variations of test data (e.g., paraphrasing, translation) can easily bypass these decontamination measures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that if such variation of test data is not eliminated, a 13B model can easily overfit a test benchmark and achieve drastically high performance, on par with GPT-4. We validate such observations in widely used benchmarks such as MMLU, GSK8k, and HumanEval. To address this growing risk, we propose a stronger LLM-based decontamination method and apply it to widely used pre-training and fine-tuning datasets, revealing significant previously unknown test overlap. For example, in pre-training sets such as RedPajama-Data-1T and StarCoder-Data, we identified that 8-18\% of the HumanEval benchmark overlaps. Interestingly, we also find such contamination in synthetic dataset generated by GPT-3.5/4, suggesting a potential risk of unintentional contamination. We urge the community to adopt stronger decontamination approaches when using public benchmarks. Moreover, we call for the community to actively develop fresh one-time exams to evaluate models accurately. Our decontamination tool is publicly available at https://github.com/lm-sys/llm-decontaminator.

The lack of freely available standardized datasets represents an aggravating factor during the development and testing the performance of novel computational techniques in exposure assessment and dosimetry research. This hinders progress as researchers are required to generate numerical data (field, power and temperature distribution) anew using simulation software for each exposure scenario. Other than being time consuming, this approach is highly susceptible to errors that occur during the configuration of the electromagnetic model. To address this issue, in this paper, the limited available data on the incident power density and resultant maximum temperature rise on the skin surface considering various steady-state exposure scenarios at 10-90 GHz have been statistically modeled. The synthetic data have been sampled from the fitted statistical multivariate distribution with respect to predetermined dosimetric constraints. We thus present a comprehensive and open-source dataset compiled of the high-fidelity numerical data considering various exposures to a realistic source. Furthermore, different surrogate models for predicting maximum temperature rise on the skin surface were fitted based on the synthetic dataset. All surrogate models were tested on the originally available data where satisfactory predictive performance has been demonstrated. A simple technique of combining quadratic polynomial and tensor-product spline surrogates, each operating on its own cluster of data, has achieved the lowest mean absolute error of 0.058 {\deg}C. Therefore, overall experimental results indicate the validity of the proposed synthetic dataset.

Millions of individuals' well-being are challenged by the harms of substance use. Harm reduction as a public health strategy is designed to improve their health outcomes and reduce safety risks. Some large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated a decent level of medical knowledge, promising to address the information needs of people who use drugs (PWUD). However, their performance in relevant tasks remains largely unexplored. We introduce HRIPBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLM's accuracy and safety risks in harm reduction information provision. The benchmark dataset HRIP-Basic has 2,160 question-answer-evidence pairs. The scope covers three tasks: checking safety boundaries, providing quantitative values, and inferring polysubstance use risks. We build the Instruction and RAG schemes to evaluate model behaviours based on their inherent knowledge and the integration of domain knowledge. Our results indicate that state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle to provide accurate harm reduction information, and sometimes, carry out severe safety risks to PWUD. The use of LLMs in harm reduction contexts should be cautiously constrained to avoid inducing negative health outcomes. WARNING: This paper contains illicit content that potentially induces harms.

Background: Health datasets from clinical sources do not reflect the breadth and diversity of disease in the real world, impacting research, medical education, and artificial intelligence (AI) tool development. Dermatology is a suitable area to develop and test a new and scalable method to create representative health datasets. Methods: We used Google Search advertisements to invite contributions to an open access dataset of images of dermatology conditions, demographic and symptom information. With informed contributor consent, we describe and release this dataset containing 10,408 images from 5,033 contributions from internet users in the United States over 8 months starting March 2023. The dataset includes dermatologist condition labels as well as estimated Fitzpatrick Skin Type (eFST) and Monk Skin Tone (eMST) labels for the images. Results: We received a median of 22 submissions/day (IQR 14-30). Female (66.72%) and younger (52% < age 40) contributors had a higher representation in the dataset compared to the US population, and 32.6% of contributors reported a non-White racial or ethnic identity. Over 97.5% of contributions were genuine images of skin conditions. Dermatologist confidence in assigning a differential diagnosis increased with the number of available variables, and showed a weaker correlation with image sharpness (Spearman's P values <0.001 and 0.01 respectively). Most contributions were short-duration (54% with onset < 7 days ago ) and 89% were allergic, infectious, or inflammatory conditions. eFST and eMST distributions reflected the geographical origin of the dataset. The dataset is available at github.com/google-research-datasets/scin . Conclusion: Search ads are effective at crowdsourcing images of health conditions. The SCIN dataset bridges important gaps in the availability of representative images of common skin conditions.

The proliferation of online toxic speech is a pertinent problem posing threats to demographic groups. While explicit toxic speech contains offensive lexical signals, implicit one consists of coded or indirect language. Therefore, it is crucial for models not only to detect implicit toxic speech but also to explain its toxicity. This draws a unique need for unified frameworks that can effectively detect and explain implicit toxic speech. Prior works mainly formulated the task of toxic speech detection and explanation as a text generation problem. Nonetheless, models trained using this strategy can be prone to suffer from the consequent error propagation problem. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the detection results of such models are much lower than those that focus only on the detection task. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ToXCL, a unified framework for the detection and explanation of implicit toxic speech. Our model consists of three modules: a (i) Target Group Generator to generate the targeted demographic group(s) of a given post; an (ii) Encoder-Decoder Model in which the encoder focuses on detecting implicit toxic speech and is boosted by a (iii) Teacher Classifier via knowledge distillation, and the decoder generates the necessary explanation. ToXCL achieves new state-of-the-art effectiveness, and outperforms baselines significantly.

We introduce a new -- currently 42 gigabyte -- ``living'' dataset of phone images of dog feces, annotated with manually drawn or AI-assisted polygon labels. There are 6k full resolution images and 4k detailed polygon annotations. The collection and annotation of images started in late 2020 and the dataset grows by roughly 1GB a month. We train VIT and MaskRCNN baseline models to explore the difficulty of the dataset. The best model achieves a pixelwise average precision of 0.858 on a 691-image validation set and 0.847 on a small independently captured 30-image contributor test set. The most recent snapshot of dataset is made publicly available through three different distribution methods: one centralized (Girder) and two decentralized (IPFS and BitTorrent). We study of the trade-offs between distribution methods and discuss the feasibility of each with respect to reliably sharing open scientific data. The code to reproduce the experiments is hosted on GitHub, and the data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Model weights are made publicly available with the dataset. Experimental hardware, time, energy, and emissions are quantified.

Hypothesis ranking is a crucial component of automated scientific discovery, particularly in natural sciences where wet-lab experiments are costly and throughput-limited. Existing approaches focus on pre-experiment ranking, relying solely on large language model's internal reasoning without incorporating empirical outcomes from experiments. We introduce the task of experiment-guided ranking, which aims to prioritize candidate hypotheses based on the results of previously tested ones. However, developing such strategies is challenging due to the impracticality of repeatedly conducting real experiments in natural science domains. To address this, we propose a simulator grounded in three domain-informed assumptions, modeling hypothesis performance as a function of similarity to a known ground truth hypothesis, perturbed by noise. We curate a dataset of 124 chemistry hypotheses with experimentally reported outcomes to validate the simulator. Building on this simulator, we develop a pseudo experiment-guided ranking method that clusters hypotheses by shared functional characteristics and prioritizes candidates based on insights derived from simulated experimental feedback. Experiments show that our method outperforms pre-experiment baselines and strong ablations.

Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes. The dataset contains large number of samples from five racial groups, in addition to information like sex and age (at judgment and first offense). Other attributes in this dataset include neighborhood characteristics obtained from census data, detailed types of offense, charge severity, case decisions, sentence lengths, year of filing etc. We also provide pseudo-identifiers for judge, county and zipcode. The dataset will not only enable researchers to more rigorously study algorithmic fairness in the context of criminal justice, but also relate algorithmic challenges with various systemic issues. We also discuss in detail the process of constructing the dataset and provide a datasheet. The WCLD dataset is available at https://clezdata.github.io/wcld/.

This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).

Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a growing concern globally, necessitating enhanced understanding of the problem and its trends through data-driven research. Social media are unique and important sources of information about SUDs, particularly since the data in such sources are often generated by people with lived experiences. In this paper, we introduce Reddit-Impacts, a challenging Named Entity Recognition (NER) dataset curated from subreddits dedicated to discussions on prescription and illicit opioids, as well as medications for opioid use disorder. The dataset specifically concentrates on the lesser-studied, yet critically important, aspects of substance use--its clinical and social impacts. We collected data from chosen subreddits using the publicly available Application Programming Interface for Reddit. We manually annotated text spans representing clinical and social impacts reported by people who also reported personal nonmedical use of substances including but not limited to opioids, stimulants and benzodiazepines. Our objective is to create a resource that can enable the development of systems that can automatically detect clinical and social impacts of substance use from text-based social media data. The successful development of such systems may enable us to better understand how nonmedical use of substances affects individual health and societal dynamics, aiding the development of effective public health strategies. In addition to creating the annotated data set, we applied several machine learning models to establish baseline performances. Specifically, we experimented with transformer models like BERT, and RoBERTa, one few-shot learning model DANN by leveraging the full training dataset, and GPT-3.5 by using one-shot learning, for automatic NER of clinical and social impacts. The dataset has been made available through the 2024 SMM4H shared tasks.

Recently, pre-trained foundation models have enabled significant advancements in multiple fields. In molecular machine learning, however, where datasets are often hand-curated, and hence typically small, the lack of datasets with labeled features, and codebases to manage those datasets, has hindered the development of foundation models. In this work, we present seven novel datasets categorized by size into three distinct categories: ToyMix, LargeMix and UltraLarge. These datasets push the boundaries in both the scale and the diversity of supervised labels for molecular learning. They cover nearly 100 million molecules and over 3000 sparsely defined tasks, totaling more than 13 billion individual labels of both quantum and biological nature. In comparison, our datasets contain 300 times more data points than the widely used OGB-LSC PCQM4Mv2 dataset, and 13 times more than the quantum-only QM1B dataset. In addition, to support the development of foundational models based on our proposed datasets, we present the Graphium graph machine learning library which simplifies the process of building and training molecular machine learning models for multi-task and multi-level molecular datasets. Finally, we present a range of baseline results as a starting point of multi-task and multi-level training on these datasets. Empirically, we observe that performance on low-resource biological datasets show improvement by also training on large amounts of quantum data. This indicates that there may be potential in multi-task and multi-level training of a foundation model and fine-tuning it to resource-constrained downstream tasks.

We have now entered the era of trillion parameter machine learning models trained on billion-sized datasets scraped from the internet. The rise of these gargantuan datasets has given rise to formidable bodies of critical work that has called for caution while generating these large datasets. These address concerns surrounding the dubious curation practices used to generate these datasets, the sordid quality of alt-text data available on the world wide web, the problematic content of the CommonCrawl dataset often used as a source for training large language models, and the entrenched biases in large-scale visio-linguistic models (such as OpenAI's CLIP model) trained on opaque datasets (WebImageText). In the backdrop of these specific calls of caution, we examine the recently released LAION-400M dataset, which is a CLIP-filtered dataset of Image-Alt-text pairs parsed from the Common-Crawl dataset. We found that the dataset contains, troublesome and explicit images and text pairs of rape, pornography, malign stereotypes, racist and ethnic slurs, and other extremely problematic content. We outline numerous implications, concerns and downstream harms regarding the current state of large scale datasets while raising open questions for various stakeholders including the AI community, regulators, policy makers and data subjects.

UAVs emerge as the optimal carriers for visual weed iden?tification and integrated pest and disease management in crops. How?ever, the absence of specialized datasets impedes the advancement of model development in this domain. To address this, we have developed the Pests and Diseases Tree dataset (PDT dataset). PDT dataset repre?sents the first high-precision UAV-based dataset for targeted detection of tree pests and diseases, which is collected in real-world operational environments and aims to fill the gap in available datasets for this field. Moreover, by aggregating public datasets and network data, we further introduced the Common Weed and Crop dataset (CWC dataset) to ad?dress the challenge of inadequate classification capabilities of test models within datasets for this field. Finally, we propose the YOLO-Dense Pest (YOLO-DP) model for high-precision object detection of weed, pest, and disease crop images. We re-evaluate the state-of-the-art detection models with our proposed PDT dataset and CWC dataset, showing the completeness of the dataset and the effectiveness of the YOLO-DP. The proposed PDT dataset, CWC dataset, and YOLO-DP model are pre?sented at https://github.com/RuiXing123/PDT_CWC_YOLO-DP.

Pretraining is the preliminary and fundamental step in developing capable language models (LM). Despite this, pretraining data design is critically under-documented and often guided by empirically unsupported intuitions. To address this, we pretrain 28 1.5B parameter decoder-only models, training on data curated (1) at different times, (2) with varying toxicity and quality filters, and (3) with different domain compositions. First, we quantify the effect of pretraining data age. A temporal shift between evaluation data and pretraining data leads to performance degradation, which is not overcome by finetuning. Second, we explore the effect of quality and toxicity filters, showing a trade-off between performance on standard benchmarks and risk of toxic generations. Our findings indicate there does not exist a one-size-fits-all solution to filtering training data. We also find that the effects of different types of filtering are not predictable from text domain characteristics. Lastly, we empirically validate that the inclusion of heterogeneous data sources, like books and web, is broadly beneficial and warrants greater prioritization. These findings constitute the largest set of experiments to validate, quantify, and expose many undocumented intuitions about text pretraining, which we hope will help support more informed data-centric decisions in LM development.

Recent research in representation learning utilizes large databases of proteins or molecules to acquire knowledge of drug and protein structures through unsupervised learning techniques. These pre-trained representations have proven to significantly enhance the accuracy of subsequent tasks, such as predicting the affinity between drugs and target proteins. In this study, we demonstrate that by incorporating knowledge graphs from diverse sources and modalities into the sequences or SMILES representation, we can further enrich the representation and achieve state-of-the-art results on established benchmark datasets. We provide preprocessed and integrated data obtained from 7 public sources, which encompass over 30M triples. Additionally, we make available the pre-trained models based on this data, along with the reported outcomes of their performance on three widely-used benchmark datasets for drug-target binding affinity prediction found in the Therapeutic Data Commons (TDC) benchmarks. Additionally, we make the source code for training models on benchmark datasets publicly available. Our objective in releasing these pre-trained models, accompanied by clean data for model pretraining and benchmark results, is to encourage research in knowledge-enhanced representation learning.

This paper presents a Patherea, a framework for point-based cell detection and classification that provides a complete solution for developing and evaluating state-of-the-art approaches. We introduce a large-scale dataset collected to directly replicate a clinical workflow for Ki-67 proliferation index estimation and use it to develop an efficient point-based approach that directly predicts point-based predictions, without the need for intermediate representations. The proposed approach effectively utilizes point proposal candidates with the hybrid Hungarian matching strategy and a flexible architecture that enables the usage of various backbones and (pre)training strategies. We report state-of-the-art results on existing public datasets - Lizard, BRCA-M2C, BCData, and the newly proposed Patherea dataset. We show that the performance on existing public datasets is saturated and that the newly proposed Patherea dataset represents a significantly harder challenge for the recently proposed approaches. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of recently proposed pathology foundational models that our proposed approach can natively utilize and benefit from. We also revisit the evaluation protocol that is used in the broader field of cell detection and classification and identify the erroneous calculation of performance metrics. Patherea provides a benchmarking utility that addresses the identified issues and enables a fair comparison of different approaches. The dataset and the code will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Humor generation is a challenging task in natural language processing due to limited resources and the quality of existing datasets. Available humor language resources often suffer from toxicity and duplication, limiting their effectiveness for training robust models. This paper proposes CleanComedy, a specialized, partially annotated toxicity-filtered corpus of English and Russian jokes collected from various sources. We study the effectiveness of our data filtering approach through a survey on humor and toxicity levels in various joke groups. In addition, we study advances in computer humor generation by comparing jokes written by humans with various groups of generative jokes, including our baseline models trained on the CleanComedy datasets.

The global cost of drug discovery and development exceeds $200 billion annually. The main results of drug discovery and development are the outcomes of clinical trials, which directly influence the regulatory approval of new drug candidates and ultimately affect patient outcomes. Despite their significance, large-scale, high-quality clinical trial outcome data are not readily available to the public. Suppose a large clinical trial outcome dataset is provided; machine learning researchers can potentially develop accurate prediction models using past trials and outcome labels, which could help prioritize and optimize therapeutic programs, ultimately benefiting patients. This paper introduces Clinical Trial Outcome (CTO) dataset, the largest trial outcome dataset with around 479K clinical trials, aggregating outcomes from multiple sources of weakly supervised labels, minimizing the noise from individual sources, and eliminating the need for human annotation. These sources include large language model (LLM) decisions on trial-related documents, news headline sentiments, stock prices of trial sponsors, trial linkages across phases, and other signals such as patient dropout rates and adverse events. CTO's labels show unprecedented agreement with supervised clinical trial outcome labels from test split of the supervised TOP dataset, with a 91 F1.

Advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence are transforming materials discovery. Yet, the availability of structured experimental data remains a bottleneck. The vast corpus of scientific literature presents a valuable and rich resource of such data. However, manual dataset creation from these resources is challenging due to issues in maintaining quality and consistency, scalability limitations, and the risk of human error and bias. Therefore, in this work, we develop a chemist AI agent, powered by large language models (LLMs), to overcome these challenges by autonomously creating structured datasets from natural language text, ranging from sentences and paragraphs to extensive scientific research articles. Our chemist AI agent, Eunomia, can plan and execute actions by leveraging the existing knowledge from decades of scientific research articles, scientists, the Internet and other tools altogether. We benchmark the performance of our approach in three different information extraction tasks with various levels of complexity, including solid-state impurity doping, metal-organic framework (MOF) chemical formula, and property relations. Our results demonstrate that our zero-shot agent, with the appropriate tools, is capable of attaining performance that is either superior or comparable to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned materials information extraction methods. This approach simplifies compilation of machine learning-ready datasets for various materials discovery applications, and significantly ease the accessibility of advanced natural language processing tools for novice users in natural language. The methodology in this work is developed as an open-source software on https://github.com/AI4ChemS/Eunomia.

Accurately classifying chemical structures is essential for cheminformatics and bioinformatics, including tasks such as identifying bioactive compounds of interest, screening molecules for toxicity to humans, finding non-organic compounds with desirable material properties, or organizing large chemical libraries for drug discovery or environmental monitoring. However, manual classification is labor-intensive and difficult to scale to large chemical databases. Existing automated approaches either rely on manually constructed classification rules, or the use of deep learning methods that lack explainability. This work presents an approach that uses generative artificial intelligence to automatically write chemical classifier programs for classes in the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) database. These programs can be used for efficient deterministic run-time classification of SMILES structures, with natural language explanations. The programs themselves constitute an explainable computable ontological model of chemical class nomenclature, which we call the ChEBI Chemical Class Program Ontology (C3PO). We validated our approach against the ChEBI database, and compared our results against state of the art deep learning models. We also demonstrate the use of C3PO to classify out-of-distribution examples taken from metabolomics repositories and natural product databases. We also demonstrate the potential use of our approach to find systematic classification errors in existing chemical databases, and show how an ensemble artificial intelligence approach combining generated ontologies, automated literature search, and multimodal vision models can be used to pinpoint potential errors requiring expert validation

Detoxification, the task of rewriting harmful language into non-toxic text, has become increasingly important amid the growing prevalence of toxic content online. However, high-quality parallel datasets for detoxification, especially for hate speech, remain scarce due to the cost and sensitivity of human annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-in-the-loop pipeline leveraging GPT-4o-mini for automated detoxification. We first replicate the ParaDetox pipeline by replacing human annotators with an LLM and show that the LLM performs comparably to human annotation. Building on this, we construct PARADEHATE, a large-scale parallel dataset specifically for hatespeech detoxification. We release PARADEHATE as a benchmark of over 8K hate/non-hate text pairs and evaluate a wide range of baseline methods. Experimental results show that models such as BART, fine-tuned on PARADEHATE, achieve better performance in style accuracy, content preservation, and fluency, demonstrating the effectiveness of LLM-generated detoxification text as a scalable alternative to human annotation.

How do we most effectively treat a disease or condition? Ideally, we could consult a database of evidence gleaned from clinical trials to answer such questions. Unfortunately, no such database exists; clinical trial results are instead disseminated primarily via lengthy natural language articles. Perusing all such articles would be prohibitively time-consuming for healthcare practitioners; they instead tend to depend on manually compiled systematic reviews of medical literature to inform care. NLP may speed this process up, and eventually facilitate immediate consult of published evidence. The Evidence Inference dataset was recently released to facilitate research toward this end. This task entails inferring the comparative performance of two treatments, with respect to a given outcome, from a particular article (describing a clinical trial) and identifying supporting evidence. For instance: Does this article report that chemotherapy performed better than surgery for five-year survival rates of operable cancers? In this paper, we collect additional annotations to expand the Evidence Inference dataset by 25\%, provide stronger baseline models, systematically inspect the errors that these make, and probe dataset quality. We also release an abstract only (as opposed to full-texts) version of the task for rapid model prototyping. The updated corpus, documentation, and code for new baselines and evaluations are available at http://evidence-inference.ebm-nlp.com/.

Recent years have seen the advent of molecular simulation datasets that are orders of magnitude larger and more diverse. These new datasets differ substantially in four aspects of complexity: 1. Chemical diversity (number of different elements), 2. system size (number of atoms per sample), 3. dataset size (number of data samples), and 4. domain shift (similarity of the training and test set). Despite these large differences, benchmarks on small and narrow datasets remain the predominant method of demonstrating progress in graph neural networks (GNNs) for molecular simulation, likely due to cheaper training compute requirements. This raises the question -- does GNN progress on small and narrow datasets translate to these more complex datasets? This work investigates this question by first developing the GemNet-OC model based on the large Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset. GemNet-OC outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on OC20 by 16% while reducing training time by a factor of 10. We then compare the impact of 18 model components and hyperparameter choices on performance in multiple datasets. We find that the resulting model would be drastically different depending on the dataset used for making model choices. To isolate the source of this discrepancy we study six subsets of the OC20 dataset that individually test each of the above-mentioned four dataset aspects. We find that results on the OC-2M subset correlate well with the full OC20 dataset while being substantially cheaper to train on. Our findings challenge the common practice of developing GNNs solely on small datasets, but highlight ways of achieving fast development cycles and generalizable results via moderately-sized, representative datasets such as OC-2M and efficient models such as GemNet-OC. Our code and pretrained model weights are open-sourced.

Keeping track of all relevant recent publications and experimental results for a research area is a challenging task. Prior work has demonstrated the efficacy of information extraction models in various scientific areas. Recently, several datasets have been released for the yet understudied materials science domain. However, these datasets focus on sub-problems such as parsing synthesis procedures or on sub-domains, e.g., solid oxide fuel cells. In this resource paper, we present MuLMS, a new dataset of 50 open-access articles, spanning seven sub-domains of materials science. The corpus has been annotated by domain experts with several layers ranging from named entities over relations to frame structures. We present competitive neural models for all tasks and demonstrate that multi-task training with existing related resources leads to benefits.

Caution: this paper may include material that could be offensive or distressing. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates the development of training approaches that mitigate the generation of unethical language and aptly manage toxic user queries. Given the challenges related to human labor and the scarcity of data, we present KoTox, comprising 39K unethical instruction-output pairs. This collection of automatically generated toxic instructions refines the training of LLMs and establishes a foundational framework for improving LLMs' ethical awareness and response to various toxic inputs, promoting more secure and responsible interactions in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications.

Social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH) play a crucial role in health outcomes and are frequently documented in clinical text. Automatically extracting SBDH information from clinical text relies on publicly available good-quality datasets. However, existing SBDH datasets exhibit substantial limitations in their availability and coverage. In this study, we introduce Synth-SBDH, a novel synthetic dataset with detailed SBDH annotations, encompassing status, temporal information, and rationale across 15 SBDH categories. We showcase the utility of Synth-SBDH on three tasks using real-world clinical datasets from two distinct hospital settings, highlighting its versatility, generalizability, and distillation capabilities. Models trained on Synth-SBDH consistently outperform counterparts with no Synth-SBDH training, achieving up to 62.5% macro-F improvements. Additionally, Synth-SBDH proves effective for rare SBDH categories and under-resource constraints. Human evaluation demonstrates a Human-LLM alignment of 71.06% and uncovers areas for future refinements.

Large datasets underlying much of current machine learning raise serious issues concerning inappropriate content such as offensive, insulting, threatening, or might otherwise cause anxiety. This calls for increased dataset documentation, e.g., using datasheets. They, among other topics, encourage to reflect on the composition of the datasets. So far, this documentation, however, is done manually and therefore can be tedious and error-prone, especially for large image datasets. Here we ask the arguably "circular" question of whether a machine can help us reflect on inappropriate content, answering Question 16 in Datasheets. To this end, we propose to use the information stored in pre-trained transformer models to assist us in the documentation process. Specifically, prompt-tuning based on a dataset of socio-moral values steers CLIP to identify potentially inappropriate content, therefore reducing human labor. We then document the inappropriate images found using word clouds, based on captions generated using a vision-language model. The documentations of two popular, large-scale computer vision datasets -- ImageNet and OpenImages -- produced this way suggest that machines can indeed help dataset creators to answer Question 16 on inappropriate image content.

Large-scale data collection is essential for developing personalized training data, mitigating the shortage of training data, and fine-tuning specialized models. However, creating high-quality datasets quickly and accurately remains a challenge due to annotation errors, the substantial time and costs associated with human labor. To address these issues, we propose Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC), an innovative methodology that automates dataset creation with negligible cost and high efficiency. Taking the image classification task as a starting point, ADC leverages LLMs for the detailed class design and code generation to collect relevant samples via search engines, significantly reducing the need for manual annotation and speeding up the data generation process. Despite these advantages, ADC also encounters real-world challenges such as label errors (label noise) and imbalanced data distributions (label bias). We provide open-source software that incorporates existing methods for label error detection, robust learning under noisy and biased data, ensuring a higher-quality training data and more robust model training procedure. Furthermore, we design three benchmark datasets focused on label noise detection, label noise learning, and class-imbalanced learning. These datasets are vital because there are few existing datasets specifically for label noise detection, despite its importance. Finally, we evaluate the performance of existing popular methods on these datasets, thereby facilitating further research in the field.

Computational methods that operate on three-dimensional molecular structure have the potential to solve important questions in biology and chemistry. In particular, deep neural networks have gained significant attention, but their widespread adoption in the biomolecular domain has been limited by a lack of either systematic performance benchmarks or a unified toolkit for interacting with molecular data. To address this, we present ATOM3D, a collection of both novel and existing benchmark datasets spanning several key classes of biomolecules. We implement several classes of three-dimensional molecular learning methods for each of these tasks and show that they consistently improve performance relative to methods based on one- and two-dimensional representations. The specific choice of architecture proves to be critical for performance, with three-dimensional convolutional networks excelling at tasks involving complex geometries, graph networks performing well on systems requiring detailed positional information, and the more recently developed equivariant networks showing significant promise. Our results indicate that many molecular problems stand to gain from three-dimensional molecular learning, and that there is potential for improvement on many tasks which remain underexplored. To lower the barrier to entry and facilitate further developments in the field, we also provide a comprehensive suite of tools for dataset processing, model training, and evaluation in our open-source atom3d Python package. All datasets are available for download from https://www.atom3d.ai .

Scientific reasoning is critical for developing AI scientists and supporting human researchers in advancing the frontiers of natural science discovery. However, the open-source community has primarily focused on mathematics and coding while neglecting the scientific domain, largely due to the absence of open, large-scale, high-quality, verifiable scientific reasoning datasets. To bridge this gap, we first present TextbookReasoning, an open dataset featuring truthful reference answers extracted from 12k university-level scientific textbooks, comprising 650k reasoning questions spanning 7 scientific disciplines. We further introduce MegaScience, a large-scale mixture of high-quality open-source datasets totaling 1.25 million instances, developed through systematic ablation studies that evaluate various data selection methodologies to identify the optimal subset for each publicly available scientific dataset. Meanwhile, we build a comprehensive evaluation system covering diverse subjects and question types across 15 benchmarks, incorporating comprehensive answer extraction strategies to ensure accurate evaluation metrics. Our experiments demonstrate that our datasets achieve superior performance and training efficiency with more concise response lengths compared to existing open-source scientific datasets. Furthermore, we train Llama3.1, Qwen2.5, and Qwen3 series base models on MegaScience, which significantly outperform the corresponding official instruct models in average performance. In addition, MegaScience exhibits greater effectiveness for larger and stronger models, suggesting a scaling benefit for scientific tuning. We release our data curation pipeline, evaluation system, datasets, and seven trained models to the community to advance scientific reasoning research.

Even with various regulations in place across countries and social media platforms (Government of India, 2021; European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022, digital abusive speech remains a significant issue. One potential approach to address this challenge is automatic text detoxification, a text style transfer (TST) approach that transforms toxic language into a more neutral or non-toxic form. To date, the availability of parallel corpora for the text detoxification task (Logachevavet al., 2022; Atwell et al., 2022; Dementievavet al., 2024a) has proven to be crucial for state-of-the-art approaches. With this work, we extend parallel text detoxification corpus to new languages -- German, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and Amharic -- testing in the extensive multilingual setup TST baselines. Next, we conduct the first of its kind an automated, explainable analysis of the descriptive features of both toxic and non-toxic sentences, diving deeply into the nuances, similarities, and differences of toxicity and detoxification across 9 languages. Finally, based on the obtained insights, we experiment with a novel text detoxification method inspired by the Chain-of-Thoughts reasoning approach, enhancing the prompting process through clustering on relevant descriptive attributes.

Low-rank approximation techniques have become the de facto standard for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their reduced computational and memory requirements. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these methods in capturing the shift of fine-tuning datasets from the initial pre-trained data distribution. Our findings reveal that there are cases in which low-rank fine-tuning falls short in learning such shifts. This, in turn, produces non-negligible side effects, especially when fine-tuning is adopted for toxicity mitigation in pre-trained models, or in scenarios where it is important to provide fair models. Through comprehensive empirical evidence on several models, datasets, and tasks, we show that low-rank fine-tuning inadvertently preserves undesirable biases and toxic behaviors. We also show that this extends to sequential decision-making tasks, emphasizing the need for careful evaluation to promote responsible LLMs development.

Deep learning models are often trained on distributed, web-scale datasets crawled from the internet. In this paper, we introduce two new dataset poisoning attacks that intentionally introduce malicious examples to a model's performance. Our attacks are immediately practical and could, today, poison 10 popular datasets. Our first attack, split-view poisoning, exploits the mutable nature of internet content to ensure a dataset annotator's initial view of the dataset differs from the view downloaded by subsequent clients. By exploiting specific invalid trust assumptions, we show how we could have poisoned 0.01% of the LAION-400M or COYO-700M datasets for just $60 USD. Our second attack, frontrunning poisoning, targets web-scale datasets that periodically snapshot crowd-sourced content -- such as Wikipedia -- where an attacker only needs a time-limited window to inject malicious examples. In light of both attacks, we notify the maintainers of each affected dataset and recommended several low-overhead defenses.

This paper introduces RiskCards, a framework for structured assessment and documentation of risks associated with an application of language models. As with all language, text generated by language models can be harmful, or used to bring about harm. Automating language generation adds both an element of scale and also more subtle or emergent undesirable tendencies to the generated text. Prior work establishes a wide variety of language model harms to many different actors: existing taxonomies identify categories of harms posed by language models; benchmarks establish automated tests of these harms; and documentation standards for models, tasks and datasets encourage transparent reporting. However, there is no risk-centric framework for documenting the complexity of a landscape in which some risks are shared across models and contexts, while others are specific, and where certain conditions may be required for risks to manifest as harms. RiskCards address this methodological gap by providing a generic framework for assessing the use of a given language model in a given scenario. Each RiskCard makes clear the routes for the risk to manifest harm, their placement in harm taxonomies, and example prompt-output pairs. While RiskCards are designed to be open-source, dynamic and participatory, we present a "starter set" of RiskCards taken from a broad literature survey, each of which details a concrete risk presentation. Language model RiskCards initiate a community knowledge base which permits the mapping of risks and harms to a specific model or its application scenario, ultimately contributing to a better, safer and shared understanding of the risk landscape.

Training and evaluating language models increasingly requires the construction of meta-datasets --diverse collections of curated data with clear provenance. Natural language prompting has recently lead to improved zero-shot generalization by transforming existing, supervised datasets into a diversity of novel pretraining tasks, highlighting the benefits of meta-dataset curation. While successful in general-domain text, translating these data-centric approaches to biomedical language modeling remains challenging, as labeled biomedical datasets are significantly underrepresented in popular data hubs. To address this challenge, we introduce BigBIO a community library of 126+ biomedical NLP datasets, currently covering 12 task categories and 10+ languages. BigBIO facilitates reproducible meta-dataset curation via programmatic access to datasets and their metadata, and is compatible with current platforms for prompt engineering and end-to-end few/zero shot language model evaluation. We discuss our process for task schema harmonization, data auditing, contribution guidelines, and outline two illustrative use cases: zero-shot evaluation of biomedical prompts and large-scale, multi-task learning. BigBIO is an ongoing community effort and is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical

Student mental health is a sensitive issue that necessitates special attention. A primary concern is the student-to-counselor ratio, which surpasses the recommended standard of 250:1 in most universities. This imbalance results in extended waiting periods for in-person consultations, which cause suboptimal treatment. Significant efforts have been directed toward developing mental health dialogue systems utilizing the existing open-source mental health-related datasets. However, currently available datasets either discuss general topics or various strategies that may not be viable for direct application due to numerous ethical constraints inherent in this research domain. To address this issue, this paper introduces a specialized mental health dataset that emphasizes the active listening strategy employed in conversation for counseling, also named as ConvCounsel. This dataset comprises both speech and text data, which can facilitate the development of a reliable pipeline for mental health dialogue systems. To demonstrate the utility of the proposed dataset, this paper also presents the NYCUKA, a spoken mental health dialogue system that is designed by using the ConvCounsel dataset. The results show the merit of using this dataset.

Text detoxification aims to minimize the risk of language models producing toxic content. Existing detoxification methods of directly constraining the model output or further training the model on the non-toxic corpus fail to achieve a decent balance between detoxification effectiveness and generation quality. This issue stems from the neglect of constrain imposed by the context since language models are designed to generate output that closely matches the context while detoxification methods endeavor to ensure the safety of the output even if it semantically deviates from the context. In view of this, we introduce a Context-aware Model self-Detoxification~(CMD) framework that pays attention to both the context and the detoxification process, i.e., first detoxifying the context and then making the language model generate along the safe context. Specifically, CMD framework involves two phases: utilizing language models to synthesize data and applying these data for training. We also introduce a toxic contrastive loss that encourages the model generation away from the negative toxic samples. Experiments on various LLMs have verified the effectiveness of our MSD framework, which can yield the best performance compared to baselines.

Hampering the interpretation of benchmark scores, evaluation data contamination has become a growing concern in the evaluation of LLMs, and an active area of research studies its effects. While evaluation data contamination is easily understood intuitively, it is surprisingly difficult to define precisely which samples should be considered contaminated and, consequently, how it impacts benchmark scores. We propose that these questions should be addressed together and that contamination metrics can be assessed based on whether models benefit from the examples they mark contaminated. We propose a novel analysis method called ConTAM, and show with a large scale survey of existing and novel n-gram based contamination metrics across 13 benchmarks and 7 models from 2 different families that ConTAM can be used to better understand evaluation data contamination and its effects. We find that contamination may have a much larger effect than reported in recent LLM releases and benefits models differently at different scales. We also find that considering only the longest contaminated substring provides a better signal than considering a union of all contaminated substrings, and that doing model and benchmark specific threshold analysis greatly increases the specificity of the results. Lastly, we investigate the impact of hyperparameter choices, finding that, among other things, both using larger values of n and disregarding matches that are infrequent in the pre-training data lead to many false negatives. With ConTAM, we provide a method to empirically ground evaluation data contamination metrics in downstream effects. With our exploration, we shed light on how evaluation data contamination can impact LLMs and provide insight into the considerations important when doing contamination analysis. We end our paper by discussing these in more detail and providing concrete suggestions for future work.

With the development of computer-assisted techniques, research communities including biochemistry and deep learning have been devoted into the drug discovery field for over a decade. Various applications of deep learning have drawn great attention in drug discovery, such as molecule generation, molecular property prediction, retrosynthesis prediction, and reaction prediction. While most existing surveys only focus on one of the applications, limiting the view of researchers in the community. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on the aforementioned four aspects, and discuss the relationships among different applications. The latest literature and classical benchmarks are presented for better understanding the development of variety of approaches. We commence by summarizing the molecule representation format in these works, followed by an introduction of recent proposed approaches for each of the four tasks. Furthermore, we review a variety of commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics and compare the performance of deep learning-based models. Finally, we conclude by identifying remaining challenges and discussing the future trend for deep learning methods in drug discovery.

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), given their remarkable text understanding and generation abilities, there is an unprecedented opportunity to develop new, LLM-based methods for trustworthy medical knowledge synthesis, extraction and summarization. This paper focuses on the problem of Pharmacovigilance (PhV), where the significance and challenges lie in identifying Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) from diverse text sources, such as medical literature, clinical notes, and drug labels. Unfortunately, this task is hindered by factors including variations in the terminologies of drugs and outcomes, and ADE descriptions often being buried in large amounts of narrative text. We present MALADE, the first effective collaborative multi-agent system powered by LLM with Retrieval Augmented Generation for ADE extraction from drug label data. This technique involves augmenting a query to an LLM with relevant information extracted from text resources, and instructing the LLM to compose a response consistent with the augmented data. MALADE is a general LLM-agnostic architecture, and its unique capabilities are: (1) leveraging a variety of external sources, such as medical literature, drug labels, and FDA tools (e.g., OpenFDA drug information API), (2) extracting drug-outcome association in a structured format along with the strength of the association, and (3) providing explanations for established associations. Instantiated with GPT-4 Turbo or GPT-4o, and FDA drug label data, MALADE demonstrates its efficacy with an Area Under ROC Curve of 0.90 against the OMOP Ground Truth table of ADEs. Our implementation leverages the Langroid multi-agent LLM framework and can be found at https://github.com/jihyechoi77/malade.

Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.

Online toxic language causes real harm, especially in regions with limited moderation tools. In this study, we evaluate how large language models handle toxic comments in Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, languages with limited labeled data. We built and manually labeled a dataset of 4,500 YouTube and TikTok comments drawn from videos across diverse categories, including music, politics, sports, modeling, influencer content, discussions of sexism, and general topics. Four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4.1, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3 Opus) were tested in two modes: zero-shot and context-augmented. We measured precision, recall, F1 score, accuracy and false positive rates. Including a short context snippet raised recall by about 0.12 on average and improved F1 score by up to 0.10, though it sometimes increased false positives. The best balance came from Gemini in context-augmented mode, reaching an F1 score of 0.82 and accuracy of 0.82, while zero-shot GPT-4.1 led on precision and had the lowest false alarms. We show how adding minimal context can improve toxic language detection in low-resource settings and suggest practical strategies such as improved prompt design and threshold calibration. These results show that prompt design alone can yield meaningful gains in toxicity detection for underserved Balkan language communities.

This paper presents a comparative benchmark evaluating the performance of Typica.ai's custom Moroccan Darija toxicity detection model against major LLM-based moderation APIs: OpenAI (omni-moderation-latest), Mistral (mistral-moderation-latest), and Anthropic Claude (claude-3-haiku-20240307). We focus on culturally grounded toxic content, including implicit insults, sarcasm, and culturally specific aggression often overlooked by general-purpose systems. Using a balanced test set derived from the OMCD_Typica.ai_Mix dataset, we report precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy, offering insights into challenges and opportunities for moderation in underrepresented languages. Our results highlight Typica.ai's superior performance, underlining the importance of culturally adapted models for reliable content moderation.

PROTACs are a promising therapeutic modality that harnesses the cell's built-in degradation machinery to degrade specific proteins. Despite their potential, developing new PROTACs is challenging and requires significant domain expertise, time, and cost. Meanwhile, machine learning has transformed drug design and development. In this work, we present a strategy for curating open-source PROTAC data and an open-source deep learning tool for predicting the degradation activity of novel PROTAC molecules. The curated dataset incorporates important information such as pDC_{50}, D_{max}, E3 ligase type, POI amino acid sequence, and experimental cell type. Our model architecture leverages learned embeddings from pretrained machine learning models, in particular for encoding protein sequences and cell type information. We assessed the quality of the curated data and the generalization ability of our model architecture against new PROTACs and targets via three tailored studies, which we recommend other researchers to use in evaluating their degradation activity models. In each study, three models predict protein degradation in a majority vote setting, reaching a top test accuracy of 82.6% and 0.848 ROC AUC, and a test accuracy of 61% and 0.615 ROC AUC when generalizing to novel protein targets. Our results are not only comparable to state-of-the-art models for protein degradation prediction, but also part of an open-source implementation which is easily reproducible and less computationally complex than existing approaches.

Given the dynamic nature of toxic language use, automated methods for detecting toxic spans are likely to encounter distributional shift. To explore this phenomenon, we evaluate three approaches for detecting toxic spans under cross-domain conditions: lexicon-based, rationale extraction, and fine-tuned language models. Our findings indicate that a simple method using off-the-shelf lexicons performs best in the cross-domain setup. The cross-domain error analysis suggests that (1) rationale extraction methods are prone to false negatives, while (2) language models, despite performing best for the in-domain case, recall fewer explicitly toxic words than lexicons and are prone to certain types of false positives. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/sfschouten/toxic-cross-domain.

With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), new and hard-to-predict harmful capabilities are emerging. This requires developers to be able to identify risks through the evaluation of "dangerous capabilities" in order to responsibly deploy LLMs. In this work, we collect the first open-source dataset to evaluate safeguards in LLMs, and deploy safer open-source LLMs at a low cost. Our dataset is curated and filtered to consist only of instructions that responsible language models should not follow. We annotate and assess the responses of six popular LLMs to these instructions. Based on our annotation, we proceed to train several BERT-like classifiers, and find that these small classifiers can achieve results that are comparable with GPT-4 on automatic safety evaluation. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

User-generated data sources have gained significance in uncovering Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs), with an increasing number of discussions occurring in the digital world. However, the existing clinical corpora predominantly revolve around scientific articles in English. This work presents a multilingual corpus of texts concerning ADRs gathered from diverse sources, including patient fora, social media, and clinical reports in German, French, and Japanese. Our corpus contains annotations covering 12 entity types, four attribute types, and 13 relation types. It contributes to the development of real-world multilingual language models for healthcare. We provide statistics to highlight certain challenges associated with the corpus and conduct preliminary experiments resulting in strong baselines for extracting entities and relations between these entities, both within and across languages.

The sparsity of labelled data is an obstacle to the development of Relation Extraction models and the completion of databases in various biomedical areas. While being of high interest in drug-discovery, the natural-products literature, reporting the identification of potential bioactive compounds from organisms, is a concrete example of such an overlooked topic. To mark the start of this new task, we created the first curated evaluation dataset and extracted literature items from the LOTUS database to build training sets. To this end, we developed a new sampler inspired by diversity metrics in ecology, named Greedy Maximum Entropy sampler, or GME-sampler (https://github.com/idiap/gme-sampler). The strategic optimization of both balance and diversity of the selected items in the evaluation set is important given the resource-intensive nature of manual curation. After quantifying the noise in the training set, in the form of discrepancies between the input abstracts text and the expected output labels, we explored different strategies accordingly. Framing the task as an end-to-end Relation Extraction, we evaluated the performance of standard fine-tuning as a generative task and few-shot learning with open Large Language Models (LLaMA 7B-65B). In addition to their evaluation in few-shot settings, we explore the potential of open Large Language Models (Vicuna-13B) as synthetic data generator and propose a new workflow for this purpose. All evaluated models exhibited substantial improvements when fine-tuned on synthetic abstracts rather than the original noisy data. We provide our best performing (f1-score=59.0) BioGPT-Large model for end-to-end RE of natural-products relationships along with all the generated synthetic data and the evaluation dataset. See more details at https://github.com/idiap/abroad-re.

Advancing AI in computational pathology requires large, high-quality, and diverse datasets, yet existing public datasets are often limited in organ diversity, class coverage, or annotation quality. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPIDER (Supervised Pathology Image-DEscription Repository), the largest publicly available patch-level dataset covering multiple organ types, including Skin, Colorectal, and Thorax, with comprehensive class coverage for each organ. SPIDER provides high-quality annotations verified by expert pathologists and includes surrounding context patches, which enhance classification performance by providing spatial context. Alongside the dataset, we present baseline models trained on SPIDER using the Hibou-L foundation model as a feature extractor combined with an attention-based classification head. The models achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple tissue categories and serve as strong benchmarks for future digital pathology research. Beyond patch classification, the model enables rapid identification of significant areas, quantitative tissue metrics, and establishes a foundation for multimodal approaches. Both the dataset and trained models are publicly available to advance research, reproducibility, and AI-driven pathology development. Access them at: https://github.com/HistAI/SPIDER

Misinformation is a complex societal issue, and mitigating solutions are difficult to create due to data deficiencies. To address this problem, we have curated the largest collection of (mis)information datasets in the literature, totaling 75. From these, we evaluated the quality of all of the 36 datasets that consist of statements or claims. We assess these datasets to identify those with solid foundations for empirical work and those with flaws that could result in misleading and non-generalizable results, such as insufficient label quality, spurious correlations, or political bias. We further provide state-of-the-art baselines on all these datasets, but show that regardless of label quality, categorical labels may no longer give an accurate evaluation of detection model performance. We discuss alternatives to mitigate this problem. Overall, this guide aims to provide a roadmap for obtaining higher quality data and conducting more effective evaluations, ultimately improving research in misinformation detection. All datasets and other artifacts are available at https://misinfo-datasets.complexdatalab.com/.

This paper has been accepted in the NeurIPS 2024 D & B Track. Harmful memes have proliferated on the Chinese Internet, while research on detecting Chinese harmful memes significantly lags behind due to the absence of reliable datasets and effective detectors. To this end, we focus on the comprehensive detection of Chinese harmful memes. We construct ToxiCN MM, the first Chinese harmful meme dataset, which consists of 12,000 samples with fine-grained annotations for various meme types. Additionally, we propose a baseline detector, Multimodal Knowledge Enhancement (MKE), incorporating contextual information of meme content generated by the LLM to enhance the understanding of Chinese memes. During the evaluation phase, we conduct extensive quantitative experiments and qualitative analyses on multiple baselines, including LLMs and our MKE. The experimental results indicate that detecting Chinese harmful memes is challenging for existing models while demonstrating the effectiveness of MKE. The resources for this paper are available at https://github.com/DUT-lujunyu/ToxiCN_MM.

This paper investigates using knowledge editing techniques to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs). We construct a benchmark, SafeEdit, which covers nine unsafe categories with various powerful attack prompts and equips comprehensive metrics for systematic evaluation. We conduct experiments to compare knowledge editing approaches with previous baselines, indicating that knowledge editing has the potential to efficiently detoxify LLMs with limited impact on general performance. Then, we propose a simple yet effective baseline, dubbed Detoxifying with Intraoperative Neural Monitoring (DINM), to diminish the toxicity of LLMs within a few tuning steps via only one instance. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the internal mechanism for various detoxify approaches, demonstrating that previous methods like SFT and DPO may merely suppress the activations of toxic parameters, while DINM mitigates the toxicity of the toxic parameters to a certain extent, making permanent adjustments. We hope that these insights could shed light on future work of developing detoxifying approaches and the underlying knowledge mechanisms of LLMs. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

The automatic detection of hate speech online is an active research area in NLP. Most of the studies to date are based on social media datasets that contribute to the creation of hate speech detection models trained on them. However, data creation processes contain their own biases, and models inherently learn from these dataset-specific biases. In this paper, we perform a large-scale cross-dataset comparison where we fine-tune language models on different hate speech detection datasets. This analysis shows how some datasets are more generalisable than others when used as training data. Crucially, our experiments show how combining hate speech detection datasets can contribute to the development of robust hate speech detection models. This robustness holds even when controlling by data size and compared with the best individual datasets.

Open-source benchmark datasets have been a critical component for advancing machine learning for robot perception in terrestrial applications. Benchmark datasets enable the widespread development of state-of-the-art machine learning methods, which require large datasets for training, validation, and thorough comparison to competing approaches. Underwater environments impose several operational challenges that hinder efforts to collect large benchmark datasets for marine robot perception. Furthermore, a low abundance of targets of interest relative to the size of the search space leads to increased time and cost required to collect useful datasets for a specific task. As a result, there is limited availability of labeled benchmark datasets for underwater applications. We present the AI4Shipwrecks dataset, which consists of 24 distinct shipwreck sites totaling 286 high-resolution labeled side scan sonar images to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous sonar image understanding. We leverage the unique abundance of targets in Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron, MI, to collect and compile a sonar imagery benchmark dataset through surveys with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We consulted with expert marine archaeologists for the labeling of robotically gathered data. We then leverage this dataset to perform benchmark experiments for comparison of state-of-the-art supervised segmentation methods, and we present insights on opportunities and open challenges for the field. The dataset and benchmarking tools will be released as an open-source benchmark dataset to spur innovation in machine learning for Great Lakes and ocean exploration. The dataset and accompanying software are available at https://umfieldrobotics.github.io/ai4shipwrecks/.

Skin lesion datasets provide essential information for understanding various skin conditions and developing effective diagnostic tools. They aid the artificial intelligence-based early detection of skin cancer, facilitate treatment planning, and contribute to medical education and research. Published large datasets have partially coverage the subclassifications of the skin lesions. This limitation highlights the need for more expansive and varied datasets to reduce false predictions and help improve the failure analysis for skin lesions. This study presents a diverse dataset comprising 12,345 dermatoscopic images with 38 subclasses of skin lesions collected in Turkiye which comprises different skin types in the transition zone between Europe and Asia. Each subgroup contains high-resolution photos and expert annotations, providing a strong and reliable basis for future research. The detailed analysis of each subgroup provided in this study facilitates targeted research endeavors and enhances the depth of understanding regarding the skin lesions. This dataset distinguishes itself through a diverse structure with 5 super classes, 15 main classes, 38 subclasses and its 12,345 high-resolution dermatoscopic images.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible capabilities and transcended the natural language processing (NLP) community, with adoption throughout many services like healthcare, therapy, education, and customer service. Since users include people with critical information needs like students or patients engaging with chatbots, the safety of these systems is of prime importance. Therefore, a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs is necessary. To this end, we systematically evaluate toxicity in over half a million generations of ChatGPT, a popular dialogue-based LLM. We find that setting the system parameter of ChatGPT by assigning it a persona, say that of the boxer Muhammad Ali, significantly increases the toxicity of generations. Depending on the persona assigned to ChatGPT, its toxicity can increase up to 6x, with outputs engaging in incorrect stereotypes, harmful dialogue, and hurtful opinions. This may be potentially defamatory to the persona and harmful to an unsuspecting user. Furthermore, we find concerning patterns where specific entities (e.g., certain races) are targeted more than others (3x more) irrespective of the assigned persona, that reflect inherent discriminatory biases in the model. We hope that our findings inspire the broader AI community to rethink the efficacy of current safety guardrails and develop better techniques that lead to robust, safe, and trustworthy AI systems.

Computational microscopy, in which hardware and algorithms of an imaging system are jointly designed, shows promise for making imaging systems that cost less, perform more robustly, and collect new types of information. Often, the performance of computational imaging systems, especially those that incorporate machine learning, is sample-dependent. Thus, standardized datasets are an essential tool for comparing the performance of different approaches. Here, we introduce the Berkeley Single Cell Computational Microscopy (BSCCM) dataset, which contains over ~12,000,000 images of 400,000 of individual white blood cells. The dataset contains images captured with multiple illumination patterns on an LED array microscope and fluorescent measurements of the abundance of surface proteins that mark different cell types. We hope this dataset will provide a valuable resource for the development and testing of new algorithms in computational microscopy and computer vision with practical biomedical applications.

Background: Cancer remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Comprehensive datasets that combine histopathological images with genetic and survival data across various tumour sites are essential for advancing computational pathology and personalised medicine. Results: We present SurGen, a dataset comprising 1,020 H&E-stained whole slide images (WSIs) from 843 colorectal cancer cases. The dataset includes detailed annotations for key genetic mutations (KRAS, NRAS, BRAF) and mismatch repair status, as well as survival data for 426 cases. To demonstrate SurGen's practical utility, we conducted a proof-of-concept machine learning experiment predicting mismatch repair status from the WSIs, achieving a test AUROC of 0.8316. These preliminary results underscore the dataset's potential to facilitate research in biomarker discovery, prognostic modelling, and advanced machine learning applications in colorectal cancer. Conclusions: SurGen offers a valuable resource for the scientific community, enabling studies that require high-quality WSIs linked with comprehensive clinical and genetic information on colorectal cancer. Our initial findings affirm the dataset's capacity to advance diagnostic precision and foster the development of personalised treatment strategies in colorectal oncology. Data available online at https://doi.org/10.6019/S-BIAD1285.

We present the Claire French Dialogue Dataset (CFDD), a resource created by members of LINAGORA Labs in the context of the OpenLLM France initiative. CFDD is a corpus containing roughly 160 million words from transcripts and stage plays in French that we have assembled and publicly released in an effort to further the development of multilingual, open source language models. This paper describes the 24 individual corpora of which CFDD is composed and provides links and citations to their original sources. It also provides our proposed breakdown of the full CFDD dataset into eight categories of subcorpora and describes the process we followed to standardize the format of the final dataset. We conclude with a discussion of similar work and future directions.

This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression, a task of expressing given data using mathematical equations, specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling range of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method can (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. As an evaluation metric, we also propose to use normalized edit distances between a predicted equation and the ground-truth equation trees. While existing metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input, normalized edit distances evaluate a sort of similarity between the ground-truth and predicted equation trees. We have conducted experiments on our new SRSD datasets using five state-of-the-art SR methods in SRBench and a simple baseline based on a recent Transformer architecture. The results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation and open up a new machine learning-based approach for scientific discovery. Our datasets and code repository are publicly available.

Electric vehicles (EVs) play an important role in reducing carbon emissions. As EV adoption accelerates, safety issues caused by EV batteries have become an important research topic. In order to benchmark and develop data-driven methods for this task, we introduce a large and comprehensive dataset of EV batteries. Our dataset includes charging records collected from hundreds of EVs from three manufacturers over several years. Our dataset is the first large-scale public dataset on real-world battery data, as existing data either include only several vehicles or is collected in the lab environment. Meanwhile, our dataset features two types of labels, corresponding to two key tasks - battery health estimation and battery capacity estimation. In addition to demonstrating how existing deep learning algorithms can be applied to this task, we further develop an algorithm that exploits the data structure of battery systems. Our algorithm achieves better results and shows that a customized method can improve model performances. We hope that this public dataset provides valuable resources for researchers, policymakers, and industry professionals to better understand the dynamics of EV battery aging and support the transition toward a sustainable transportation system.

We release the EARS (Expressive Anechoic Recordings of Speech) dataset, a high-quality speech dataset comprising 107 speakers from diverse backgrounds, totaling in 100 hours of clean, anechoic speech data. The dataset covers a large range of different speaking styles, including emotional speech, different reading styles, non-verbal sounds, and conversational freeform speech. We benchmark various methods for speech enhancement and dereverberation on the dataset and evaluate their performance through a set of instrumental metrics. In addition, we conduct a listening test with 20 participants for the speech enhancement task, where a generative method is preferred. We introduce a blind test set that allows for automatic online evaluation of uploaded data. Dataset download links and automatic evaluation server can be found online.

Large-scale data sets on scholarly publications are the basis for a variety of bibliometric analyses and natural language processing (NLP) applications. Especially data sets derived from publication's full-text have recently gained attention. While several such data sets already exist, we see key shortcomings in terms of their domain and time coverage, citation network completeness, and representation of full-text content. To address these points, we propose a new version of the data set unarXive. We base our data processing pipeline and output format on two existing data sets, and improve on each of them. Our resulting data set comprises 1.9 M publications spanning multiple disciplines and 32 years. It furthermore has a more complete citation network than its predecessors and retains a richer representation of document structure as well as non-textual publication content such as mathematical notation. In addition to the data set, we provide ready-to-use training/test data for citation recommendation and IMRaD classification. All data and source code is publicly available at https://github.com/IllDepence/unarXive.

Air pollution poses a significant threat to public health and well-being, particularly in urban areas. This study introduces a series of machine-learning models that integrate data from the Sentinel-5P satellite, meteorological conditions, and topological characteristics to forecast future levels of five major pollutants. The investigation delineates the process of data collection, detailing the combination of diverse data sources utilized in the study. Through experiments conducted in the Milan metropolitan area, the models demonstrate their efficacy in predicting pollutant levels for the forthcoming day, achieving a percentage error of around 30%. The proposed models are advantageous as they are independent of monitoring stations, facilitating their use in areas without existing infrastructure. Additionally, we have released the collected dataset to the public, aiming to stimulate further research in this field. This research contributes to advancing our understanding of urban air quality dynamics and emphasizes the importance of amalgamating satellite, meteorological, and topographical data to develop robust pollution forecasting models.

High-throughput reaction condition (RC) screening is fundamental to chemical synthesis. However, current RC screening suffers from laborious and costly trial-and-error workflows. Traditional computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) tools fail to find suitable RCs due to data sparsity and inadequate reaction representations. Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) are capable of tackling chemistry-related problems, such as molecule design, and chemical logic Q\&A tasks. However, LLMs have not yet achieved accurate predictions of chemical reaction conditions. Here, we present MM-RCR, a text-augmented multimodal LLM that learns a unified reaction representation from SMILES, reaction graphs, and textual corpus for chemical reaction recommendation (RCR). To train MM-RCR, we construct 1.2 million pair-wised Q\&A instruction datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that MM-RCR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two open benchmark datasets and exhibits strong generalization capabilities on out-of-domain (OOD) and High-Throughput Experimentation (HTE) datasets. MM-RCR has the potential to accelerate high-throughput condition screening in chemical synthesis.

Spatial confounding poses a significant challenge in scientific studies involving spatial data, where unobserved spatial variables can influence both treatment and outcome, possibly leading to spurious associations. To address this problem, we introduce SpaCE: The Spatial Confounding Environment, the first toolkit to provide realistic benchmark datasets and tools for systematically evaluating causal inference methods designed to alleviate spatial confounding. Each dataset includes training data, true counterfactuals, a spatial graph with coordinates, and smoothness and confounding scores characterizing the effect of a missing spatial confounder. It also includes realistic semi-synthetic outcomes and counterfactuals, generated using state-of-the-art machine learning ensembles, following best practices for causal inference benchmarks. The datasets cover real treatment and covariates from diverse domains, including climate, health and social sciences. SpaCE facilitates an automated end-to-end pipeline, simplifying data loading, experimental setup, and evaluating machine learning and causal inference models. The SpaCE project provides several dozens of datasets of diverse sizes and spatial complexity. It is publicly available as a Python package, encouraging community feedback and contributions.

The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.

While alignment algorithms are now commonly used to tune pre-trained language models towards a user's preferences, we lack explanations for the underlying mechanisms in which models become ``aligned'', thus making it difficult to explain phenomena like jailbreaks. In this work we study a popular algorithm, direct preference optimization (DPO), and the mechanisms by which it reduces toxicity. Namely, we first study how toxicity is represented and elicited in a pre-trained language model, GPT2-medium. We then apply DPO with a carefully crafted pairwise dataset to reduce toxicity. We examine how the resulting model averts toxic outputs, and find that capabilities learned from pre-training are not removed, but rather bypassed. We use this insight to demonstrate a simple method to un-align the model, reverting it back to its toxic behavior.

We introduce Arboretum, the largest publicly accessible dataset designed to advance AI for biodiversity applications. This dataset, curated from the iNaturalist community science platform and vetted by domain experts to ensure accuracy, includes 134.6 million images, surpassing existing datasets in scale by an order of magnitude. The dataset encompasses image-language paired data for a diverse set of species from birds (Aves), spiders/ticks/mites (Arachnida), insects (Insecta), plants (Plantae), fungus/mushrooms (Fungi), snails (Mollusca), and snakes/lizards (Reptilia), making it a valuable resource for multimodal vision-language AI models for biodiversity assessment and agriculture research. Each image is annotated with scientific names, taxonomic details, and common names, enhancing the robustness of AI model training. We showcase the value of Arboretum by releasing a suite of CLIP models trained using a subset of 40 million captioned images. We introduce several new benchmarks for rigorous assessment, report accuracy for zero-shot learning, and evaluations across life stages, rare species, confounding species, and various levels of the taxonomic hierarchy. We anticipate that Arboretum will spur the development of AI models that can enable a variety of digital tools ranging from pest control strategies, crop monitoring, and worldwide biodiversity assessment and environmental conservation. These advancements are critical for ensuring food security, preserving ecosystems, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Arboretum is publicly available, easily accessible, and ready for immediate use. Please see the https://baskargroup.github.io/Arboretum/{project website} for links to our data, models, and code.

This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences. We outline six specific risk areas: I. Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, V. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Interaction Harms, VI. Automation, Access, and Environmental Harms. The first area concerns the perpetuation of stereotypes, unfair discrimination, exclusionary norms, toxic language, and lower performance by social group for LMs. The second focuses on risks from private data leaks or LMs correctly inferring sensitive information. The third addresses risks arising from poor, false or misleading information including in sensitive domains, and knock-on risks such as the erosion of trust in shared information. The fourth considers risks from actors who try to use LMs to cause harm. The fifth focuses on risks specific to LLMs used to underpin conversational agents that interact with human users, including unsafe use, manipulation or deception. The sixth discusses the risk of environmental harm, job automation, and other challenges that may have a disparate effect on different social groups or communities. In total, we review 21 risks in-depth. We discuss the points of origin of different risks and point to potential mitigation approaches. Lastly, we discuss organisational responsibilities in implementing mitigations, and the role of collaboration and participation. We highlight directions for further research, particularly on expanding the toolkit for assessing and evaluating the outlined risks in LMs.

Toxicity has become a grave problem for many online communities and has been growing across many languages, including Russian. Hate speech creates an environment of intimidation, discrimination, and may even incite some real-world violence. Both researchers and social platforms have been focused on developing models to detect toxicity in online communication for a while now. A common problem of these models is the presence of bias towards some words (e.g. woman, black, jew) that are not toxic, but serve as triggers for the classifier due to model caveats. In this paper, we describe our efforts towards classifying hate speech in Russian, and propose simple techniques of reducing unintended bias, such as generating training data with language models using terms and words related to protected identities as context and applying word dropout to such words.

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.

This paper describes EMBER: a labeled benchmark dataset for training machine learning models to statically detect malicious Windows portable executable files. The dataset includes features extracted from 1.1M binary files: 900K training samples (300K malicious, 300K benign, 300K unlabeled) and 200K test samples (100K malicious, 100K benign). To accompany the dataset, we also release open source code for extracting features from additional binaries so that additional sample features can be appended to the dataset. This dataset fills a void in the information security machine learning community: a benign/malicious dataset that is large, open and general enough to cover several interesting use cases. We enumerate several use cases that we considered when structuring the dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate one use case wherein we compare a baseline gradient boosted decision tree model trained using LightGBM with default settings to MalConv, a recently published end-to-end (featureless) deep learning model for malware detection. Results show that even without hyper-parameter optimization, the baseline EMBER model outperforms MalConv. The authors hope that the dataset, code and baseline model provided by EMBER will help invigorate machine learning research for malware detection, in much the same way that benchmark datasets have advanced computer vision research.