Cannot or Should Not? Automatic Analysis of Refusal Composition in IFT/RLHF Datasets and Refusal Behavior of Black-Box LLMs
Refusals - instances where large language models (LLMs) decline or fail to fully execute user instructions - are crucial for both AI safety and AI capabilities and the reduction of hallucinations in particular. These behaviors are learned during post-training, especially in instruction fine-tuning (IFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, existing taxonomies and evaluation datasets for refusals are inadequate, often focusing solely on should-not-related (instead of cannot-related) categories, and lacking tools for auditing refusal content in black-box LLM outputs. We present a comprehensive framework for classifying LLM refusals: (a) a taxonomy of 16 refusal categories, (b) a human-annotated dataset of over 8,600 instances from publicly available IFT and RLHF datasets, (c) a synthetic dataset with 8,000 examples for each refusal category, and (d) classifiers trained for refusal classification. Our work enables precise auditing of refusal behaviors in black-box LLMs and automatic analyses of refusal patterns in large IFT and RLHF datasets. This facilitates the strategic adjustment of LLM refusals, contributing to the development of more safe and reliable LLMs.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Fail-Closed Alignment for Large Language Models
We identify a structural weakness in current large language model (LLM) alignment: modern refusal mechanisms are fail-open. While existing approaches encode refusal behaviors across multiple latent features, suppressing …
RefusalBench: Why Refusal Rate Misranks Frontier LLMs on Biological Research Prompts
Frontier large language models are increasingly deployed as orchestration backbones for biological research workflows, yet no shared evidence base exists for comparing their refusal behaviour on legitimate research promp…
Safety for Whom? Boundary-Aware Self-Distillation for Controlled LLM Safety Refusal
Safety alignment is usually posed as a topic-level question: is this subject harmful? Deployments ask a narrower one. A civics tutor and a public-sector assistant may share a base model yet need different boundaries insi…
Over-Refusal and Representation Subspaces: A Mechanistic Analysis of Task-Conditioned Refusal in Aligned LLMs
Aligned language models that are trained to refuse harmful requests also exhibit over-refusal: they decline safe instructions that seemingly resemble harmful instructions. A natural approach is to ablate the global refus…
Measuring Safety Alignment Effects in Autonomous Security Agents
Do stock safety-aligned language models and their uncensored or abliterated derivatives behave differently when run as autonomous security agents? Single-turn refusal benchmarks cannot answer this question: security agen…