{"id":1093038,"date":"2024-10-11T15:46:39","date_gmt":"2024-10-11T22:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1093038"},"modified":"2024-10-11T15:46:39","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T22:46:39","slug":"the-art-of-saying-no-contextual-noncompliance-in-language-models","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/the-art-of-saying-no-contextual-noncompliance-in-language-models\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Saying No: Contextual Noncompliance in Language Models"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chat-based language models are designed to be helpful, yet they should not comply with every user request. While most existing work primarily focuses on refusal of&#8221;unsafe&#8221;queries, we posit that the scope of noncompliance should be broadened. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of contextual noncompliance describing when and how models should not comply with user requests. Our taxonomy spans a wide range of categories including incomplete, unsupported, indeterminate, and humanizing requests (in addition to unsafe requests). To test noncompliance capabilities of language models, we use this taxonomy to develop a new evaluation suite of 1000 noncompliance prompts. We find that most existing models show significantly high compliance rates in certain previously understudied categories with models like GPT-4 incorrectly complying with as many as 30% of requests. To address these gaps, we explore different training strategies using a synthetically-generated training set of requests and expected noncompliant responses. Our experiments demonstrate that while direct finetuning of instruction-tuned models can lead to both over-refusal and a decline in general capabilities, using parameter efficient methods like low rank adapters helps to strike a good balance between appropriate noncompliance and other capabilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chat-based language models are designed to be helpful, yet they should not comply with every user request. While most existing work primarily focuses on refusal of&#8221;unsafe&#8221;queries, we posit that the scope of noncompliance should be broadened. We introduce a comprehensive taxonomy of contextual noncompliance describing when and how models should not comply with user requests. 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