The Scales of Justitia: A Comprehensive Survey on Safety Evaluation of LLMs

Abstract: With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in the field of NLP, including areas such as content generation, human-computer interaction, machine translation, and code generation, among others. However, their widespread deployment has also raised significant safety concerns. In recent years, LLM-generated content has occasionally exhibited unsafe elements like toxicity and bias, particularly in adversarial scenarios, which has garnered extensive attention from both academia and industry. While numerous efforts have been made to evaluate the safety risks associated with LLMs, there remains a lack of systematic reviews summarizing these research endeavors. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of recent advancements in LLMs safety evaluation, focusing on several key aspects: (1) "Why evaluate" that explores the background of LLMs safety evaluation, how they differ from general LLMs evaluation, and the significance of such evaluation; (2) "What to evaluate" that examines and categorizes existing safety evaluation tasks based on key capabilities, including dimensions such as toxicity, robustness, ethics, bias and fairness, truthfulness, and so on; (3) "Where to evaluate" that summarizes the evaluation metrics, datasets and benchmarks currently used in safety evaluations; (4) "How to evaluate" that reviews existing evaluation toolkit, and categorizing mainstream evaluation methods based on the roles of the evaluators. Finally, we identify the challenges in LLMs safety evaluation and propose potential research directions to promote further advancement in this field. We emphasize the importance of prioritizing LLMs safety evaluation to ensure the safe deployment of these models in real-world applications.