分离拒绝理由与套话,减少大模型误拒无辜请求。
Refuse without Refusal: A Structural Analysis of Safety-Tuning Responses for Reducing False Refusals in Language Models
- 拆解安全微调数据中的拒绝语句与理由,发现套话干扰判断。
- 仅用理由训练可降低90%以上误拒,安全性能基本不变。
- 适合追求高响应率又不牺牲安全性的对话系统研发者。
在对齐大型语言模型时,如何平衡有用性与安全性仍是核心挑战。模型应拒绝有害请求(如“如何射击某人?”),同时对看似危险但无害的提问(如“哪里能拍张好照片?”)保持回应。然而,模型常难以区分真有害与表面危险的请求,导致误拒。本文将安全微调数据中的回复分解为两部分:(i) 固定格式的拒绝声明,(ii) 拒绝理由。实验表明,拒绝声明会诱使模型依赖表面线索,阻碍准确判断;而仅训练于理由部分可显著降低误拒率,同时保持相近的安全表现。该方法在零样本提示和推理时缓解策略中也有效。结果强调了精细标注、细粒度安全监督数据的重要性,并为构建兼顾有用性与安全性的智能体指明方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Striking a balance between helpfulness and safety remains a fundamental challenge in aligning large language models. To achieve this balance, models should refuse harmful queries (e.g., "How do I shoot someone?") while remaining responsive to benign inputs, even those superficially resembling harmful queries (e.g., "Where can I shoot a good photo?"). However, models often struggle to distinguish genuinely harmful queries from benign queries that contain superficially risky language, resulting in false refusals. In this paper, we address the issue by decomposing a response in the safety-tuning dataset into two distinct components: (i) a boilerplate refusal statement and (ii) a rationale explaining the refusal. Our experiments and analyses show that refusal statements impede accurate discrimination between harmful and benign queries by inducing reliance on superficial cues. In contrast, training solely on rationales reduces false refusals while maintaining a comparable level of safety performance. Rationale-Only benefits also appear in our ICL configuration and remain compatible with the evaluated inference-time mitigation methods. The results emphasize the necessity of precisely curated, fine-grained safety supervision datasets and outline directions for constructing aligned agents that better reconcile helpfulness with safety.
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