CRiskEval: A Chinese Multi-Level Risk Evaluation Benchmark Dataset for Large Language Models

TL;DR

CRiskEval is a comprehensive Chinese dataset designed to evaluate the risk tendencies of large language models across multiple frontier risk types, revealing increasing risk inclinations with larger model sizes.

Contribution

The paper introduces CRiskEval, a novel risk taxonomy and dataset for assessing LLMs' risk proclivities in Chinese, with detailed annotation and empirical evaluation.

Findings

Most models show over 40% risk tendency.

Risk inclination increases with model size.

Models tend toward dangerous goals like self-sustainability.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are possessed of numerous beneficial capabilities, yet their potential inclination harbors unpredictable risks that may materialize in the future. We hence propose CRiskEval, a Chinese dataset meticulously designed for gauging the risk proclivities inherent in LLMs such as resource acquisition and malicious coordination, as part of efforts for proactive preparedness. To curate CRiskEval, we define a new risk taxonomy with 7 types of frontier risks and 4 safety levels, including extremely hazardous,moderately hazardous, neutral and safe. We follow the philosophy of tendency evaluation to empirically measure the stated desire of LLMs via fine-grained multiple-choice question answering. The dataset consists of 14,888 questions that simulate scenarios related to predefined 7 types of frontier risks. Each question is accompanied with 4 answer choices that state opinions or behavioral tendencies corresponding to the question. All answer choices are manually annotated with one of the defined risk levels so that we can easily build a fine-grained frontier risk profile for each assessed LLM. Extensive evaluation with CRiskEval on a spectrum of prevalent Chinese LLMs has unveiled a striking revelation: most models exhibit risk tendencies of more than 40% (weighted tendency to the four risk levels). Furthermore, a subtle increase in the model's inclination toward urgent self-sustainability, power seeking and other dangerous goals becomes evident as the size of models increase. To promote further research on the frontier risk evaluation of LLMs, we publicly release our dataset at https://github.com/lingshi6565/Risk_eval.