arXiv AI By Yaowen Ye, Jacob Steinhardt, Sarah Schwettmann, Cassidy Laidlaw

Mass Producing Training Data with Surprising Side Effects

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The paper "Mass Producing Training Data with Surprising Side Effects" presents a method for automatically discovering datasets that cause unexpected side effects in language models. By defining three criteria—target behavior elicitation, ordinary appearance, and human surprise—the authors use LLM judges and search techniques to generate 6,575 datasets across eight behaviors. These datasets, which generalize across model families and sizes, provide a testbed for studying generalization and predicting training side effects before deployment.

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