Ian Kivlichan

Aaron Jaech, Adam Kalai, Adam Lerer et al. · openai

The o1 model series is trained with large-scale reinforcement learning to reason using chain of thought. These advanced reasoning capabilities provide new avenues for improving the safety and robustness of our models. In particular, our models can reason about our safety policies in context when responding to potentially unsafe prompts, through deliberative alignment. This leads to state-of-the-art performance on certain benchmarks for risks such as generating illicit advice, choosing stereotyped responses, and succumbing to known jailbreaks. Training models to incorporate a chain of thought before answering has the potential to unlock substantial benefits, while also increasing potential risks that stem from heightened intelligence. Our results underscore the need for building robust alignment methods, extensively stress-testing their efficacy, and maintaining meticulous risk management protocols. This report outlines the safety work carried out for the OpenAI o1 and OpenAI o1-mini models, including safety evaluations, external red teaming, and Preparedness Framework evaluations.

Mark Diaz, Ian D. Kivlichan, Rachel Rosen et al.

Human annotated data plays a crucial role in machine learning (ML) research and development. However, the ethical considerations around the processes and decisions that go into dataset annotation have not received nearly enough attention. In this paper, we survey an array of literature that provides insights into ethical considerations around crowdsourced dataset annotation. We synthesize these insights, and lay out the challenges in this space along two layers: (1) who the annotator is, and how the annotators' lived experiences can impact their annotations, and (2) the relationship between the annotators and the crowdsourcing platforms, and what that relationship affords them. Finally, we introduce a novel framework, CrowdWorkSheets, for dataset developers to facilitate transparent documentation of key decisions points at various stages of the data annotation pipeline: task formulation, selection of annotators, platform and infrastructure choices, dataset analysis and evaluation, and dataset release and maintenance.

Nitesh Goyal, Ian Kivlichan, Rachel Rosen et al.

Machine learning models are commonly used to detect toxicity in online conversations. These models are trained on datasets annotated by human raters. We explore how raters' self-described identities impact how they annotate toxicity in online comments. We first define the concept of specialized rater pools: rater pools formed based on raters' self-described identities, rather than at random. We formed three such rater pools for this study--specialized rater pools of raters from the U.S. who identify as African American, LGBTQ, and those who identify as neither. Each of these rater pools annotated the same set of comments, which contains many references to these identity groups. We found that rater identity is a statistically significant factor in how raters will annotate toxicity for identity-related annotations. Using preliminary content analysis, we examined the comments with the most disagreement between rater pools and found nuanced differences in the toxicity annotations. Next, we trained models on the annotations from each of the different rater pools, and compared the scores of these models on comments from several test sets. Finally, we discuss how using raters that self-identify with the subjects of comments can create more inclusive machine learning models, and provide more nuanced ratings than those by random raters.

Senjuti Dutta, Sid Mittal, Sherol Chen et al.

The prevalence and impact of toxic discussions online have made content moderation crucial.Automated systems can play a vital role in identifying toxicity, and reducing the reliance on human moderation.Nevertheless, identifying toxic comments for diverse communities continues to present challenges that are addressed in this paper.The two-part goal of this study is to(1)identify intuitive variances from annotator disagreement using quantitative analysis and (2)model the subjectivity of these viewpoints.To achieve our goal, we published a new dataset\footnote{\url{https://github.com/XXX}} with expert annotators' annotations and used two other public datasets to identify the subjectivity of toxicity.Then leveraging the Large Language Model(LLM),we evaluate the model's ability to mimic diverse viewpoints on toxicity by varying size of the training data and utilizing same set of annotators as the test set used during model training and a separate set of annotators as the test set.We conclude that subjectivity is evident across all annotator groups, demonstrating the shortcomings of majority-rule voting. Moving forward, subjective annotations should serve as ground truth labels for training models for domains like toxicity in diverse communities.

Wenbo Zhang, Hangzhi Guo, Ian D Kivlichan et al.

Toxicity is an increasingly common and severe issue in online spaces. Consequently, a rich line of machine learning research over the past decade has focused on computationally detecting and mitigating online toxicity. These efforts crucially rely on human-annotated datasets that identify toxic content of various kinds in social media texts. However, such annotations historically yield low inter-rater agreement, which was often dealt with by taking the majority vote or other such approaches to arrive at a single ground truth label. Recent research has pointed out the importance of accounting for the subjective nature of this task when building and utilizing these datasets, and this has triggered work on analyzing and better understanding rater disagreements, and how they could be effectively incorporated into the machine learning developmental pipeline. While these efforts are filling an important gap, there is a lack of a broader framework about the root causes of rater disagreement, and therefore, we situate this work within that broader landscape. In this survey paper, we analyze a broad set of literature on the reasons behind rater disagreements focusing on online toxicity, and propose a detailed taxonomy for the same. Further, we summarize and discuss the potential solutions targeting each reason for disagreement. We also discuss several open issues, which could promote the future development of online toxicity research.

Tong Mu, Alec Helyar, Johannes Heidecke et al.

Reinforcement learning based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) on human preferences has been shown to enhance both their capabilities and safety behavior. However, in cases related to safety, without precise instructions to human annotators, the data collected may cause the model to become overly cautious, or to respond in an undesirable style, such as being judgmental. Additionally, as model capabilities and usage patterns evolve, there may be a costly need to add or relabel data to modify safety behavior. We propose a novel preference modeling approach that utilizes AI feedback and only requires a small amount of human data. Our method, Rule Based Rewards (RBR), uses a collection of rules for desired or undesired behaviors (e.g. refusals should not be judgmental) along with a LLM grader. In contrast to prior methods using AI feedback, our method uses fine-grained, composable, LLM-graded few-shot prompts as reward directly in RL training, resulting in greater control, accuracy and ease of updating. We show that RBRs are an effective training method, achieving an F1 score of 97.1, compared to a human-feedback baseline of 91.7, resulting in much higher safety-behavior accuracy through better balancing usefulness and safety.

Remi Denton, Mark Díaz, Ian Kivlichan et al.

Human annotations play a crucial role in machine learning (ML) research and development. However, the ethical considerations around the processes and decisions that go into building ML datasets has not received nearly enough attention. In this paper, we survey an array of literature that provides insights into ethical considerations around crowdsourced dataset annotation. We synthesize these insights, and lay out the challenges in this space along two layers: (1) who the annotator is, and how the annotators' lived experiences can impact their annotations, and (2) the relationship between the annotators and the crowdsourcing platforms and what that relationship affords them. Finally, we put forth a concrete set of recommendations and considerations for dataset developers at various stages of the ML data pipeline: task formulation, selection of annotators, platform and infrastructure choices, dataset analysis and evaluation, and dataset documentation and release.

Ian D. Kivlichan, Zi Lin, Jeremiah Liu et al.

Content moderation is often performed by a collaboration between humans and machine learning models. However, it is not well understood how to design the collaborative process so as to maximize the combined moderator-model system performance. This work presents a rigorous study of this problem, focusing on an approach that incorporates model uncertainty into the collaborative process. First, we introduce principled metrics to describe the performance of the collaborative system under capacity constraints on the human moderator, quantifying how efficiently the combined system utilizes human decisions. Using these metrics, we conduct a large benchmark study evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art uncertainty models under different collaborative review strategies. We find that an uncertainty-based strategy consistently outperforms the widely used strategy based on toxicity scores, and moreover that the choice of review strategy drastically changes the overall system performance. Our results demonstrate the importance of rigorous metrics for understanding and developing effective moderator-model systems for content moderation, as well as the utility of uncertainty estimation in this domain.