Gen-AI for User Safety: A Survey
This work addresses the need for improved user safety detection across various domains, but it is incremental as it primarily summarizes existing research without introducing new methods.
This survey tackles the problem of detecting user safety violations by reviewing how generative AI techniques can overcome limitations of traditional ML/DM classifiers in understanding natural language context and nuances, and it provides a comprehensive overview of applications across domains like phishing and content moderation.
Machine Learning and data mining techniques (i.e. supervised and unsupervised techniques) are used across domains to detect user safety violations. Examples include classifiers used to detect whether an email is spam or a web-page is requesting bank login information. However, existing ML/DM classifiers are limited in their ability to understand natural languages w.r.t the context and nuances. The aforementioned challenges are overcome with the arrival of Gen-AI techniques, along with their inherent ability w.r.t translation between languages, fine-tuning between various tasks and domains. In this manuscript, we provide a comprehensive overview of the various work done while using Gen-AI techniques w.r.t user safety. In particular, we first provide the various domains (e.g. phishing, malware, content moderation, counterfeit, physical safety) across which Gen-AI techniques have been applied. Next, we provide how Gen-AI techniques can be used in conjunction with various data modalities i.e. text, images, videos, audio, executable binaries to detect violations of user-safety. Further, also provide an overview of how Gen-AI techniques can be used in an adversarial setting. We believe that this work represents the first summarization of Gen-AI techniques for user-safety.