Sean Rooney

Elizabeth M. Daly, Sean Rooney, Seshu Tirupathi et al.

Evaluating the safety of AI Systems is a pressing concern for organizations deploying them. In addition to the societal damage done by the lack of fairness of those systems, deployers are concerned about the legal repercussions and the reputational damage incurred by the use of models that are unsafe. Safety covers both what a model does; e.g., can it be used to reveal personal information from its training set, and how a model was built; e.g., was it only trained on licensed data sets. Determining the safety of an AI system requires gathering information from a wide set of heterogeneous sources including safety benchmarks and technical documentation for the set of models used in that system. In addition, responsible use is encouraged through mechanisms that advise and help the user to take mitigating actions where safety risks are detected. We present Usage Governance Advisor which creates semi-structured governance information, identifies and prioritizes risks according to the intended use case, recommends appropriate benchmarks and risk assessments and importantly proposes mitigation strategies and actions.

Lina Berrayana, Sean Rooney, Luis Garcés-Erice et al.

The creation of benchmarks to evaluate the safety of Large Language Models is one of the key activities within the trusted AI community. These benchmarks allow models to be compared for different aspects of safety such as toxicity, bias, harmful behavior etc. Independent benchmarks adopt different approaches with distinct data sets and evaluation methods. We investigate how robust such benchmarks are by using different approaches to rank a set of representative models for bias and compare how similar are the overall rankings. We show that different but widely used bias evaluations methods result in disparate model rankings. We conclude with recommendations for the community in the usage of such benchmarks.