Navigating the Sea of LLM Evaluation: Investigating Bias in Toxicity Benchmarks
For organizations using toxicity benchmarks to certify LLMs for deployment, this reveals that current evaluations may be unreliable, risking unsafe system deployment.
This work investigates biases in LLM toxicity benchmarks, finding that altering evaluation setups (e.g., task type, data domain, model choice) leads to significant discrepancies, such as increased harm flagging in summarization tasks and model-specific instabilities.
The rapid adoption of LLMs in both research and industry highlights the challenges of deploying them safely and reveals a gap in the systematic evaluation of toxicity benchmarks. As organizations increasingly rely on these benchmarks to certify models for customer-facing applications and automated moderation, unrecognized evaluation biases could lead to the deployment of vulnerable or unsafe systems. This work investigates the robustness of established benchmarking setups and examines how to measure currently neglected intrinsic biases, such as those related to model choice, metrics, and task types. Our experiments uncover significant discrepancies in benchmark behaviors when evaluation setups are altered. Specifically, shifting the task from text completion to summarization increases the tendency of benchmarks to flag content as harmful. Additionally, certain benchmarks fail to maintain consistent behavior when the input data domain is changed. Furthermore, we observe model-specific instabilities, demonstrating a clear need for more robust and comprehensive safety evaluation frameworks.