{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/safetybench-evaluating-the-safety-of-large","title":"SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models","arxiv_id":"2309.07045","date":"2023-09-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhexin Zhang","Leqi Lei","Lindong Wu","Rui Sun","Yongkang Huang","Chong Long","Xiao Liu","Xuanyu Lei","Jie Tang","Minlie Huang"],"abstract":"With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing attention has been paid to their safety concerns. Consequently, evaluating the safety of LLMs has become an essential task for facilitating the broad applications of LLMs. Nevertheless, the absence of comprehensive safety evaluation benchmarks poses a significant impediment to effectively assess and enhance the safety of LLMs. In this work, we present SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the safety of LLMs, which comprises 11,435 diverse multiple choice questions spanning across 7 distinct categories of safety concerns. Notably, SafetyBench also incorporates both Chinese and English data, facilitating the evaluation in both languages. Our extensive tests over 25 popular Chinese and English LLMs in both zero-shot and few-shot settings reveal a substantial performance advantage for GPT-4 over its counterparts, and there is still significant room for improving the safety of current LLMs. We also demonstrate that the measured safety understanding abilities in SafetyBench are correlated with safety generation abilities. Data and evaluation guidelines are available at \\url{https://github.com/thu-coai/SafetyBench}{https://github.com/thu-coai/SafetyBench}. Submission entrance and leaderboard are available at \\url{https://llmbench.ai/safety}{https://llmbench.ai/safety}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07045v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.07045v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"safetybench-evaluating-the-safety-of-large","repo_url":"https://github.com/thu-coai/safetybench","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multiple-choice","task_name":"Multiple-choice"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"absolute-position-encodings","method_name":"Absolute Position Encodings"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"gpt-4","method_name":"GPT-4"},{"method_slug":"label-smoothing","method_name":"Label Smoothing"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"position-wise-feed-forward-layer","method_name":"Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"transformer","method_name":"Transformer"}],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"safetybench","name":"SafetyBench","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2309.07045","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2309.07045","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2309.07045"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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