Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to their extensive global deployment, and ensuring their safety calls for comprehensive and multilingual toxicity evaluations. However, existing toxicity benchmarks are overwhelmingly focused on English, posing serious risks to deploying LLMs in other languages. We address this by introducing PolygloToxicityPrompts (PTP), the first large-scale multilingual toxicity evaluation benchmark of 425K naturally occurring prompts spanning 17 languages. We overcome the scarcity of naturally occurring toxicity in web-text and ensure coverage across languages with varying resources by automatically scraping over 100M web-text documents. Using PTP, we investigate research questions to study the impact of model size, prompt language, and instruction and preference-tuning methods on toxicity by benchmarking over 60 LLMs. Notably, we find that toxicity increases as language resources decrease or model size increases. Although instruction- and preference-tuning reduce toxicity, the choice of preference-tuning method does not have any significant impact. Our findings shed light on crucial shortcomings of LLM safeguarding and highlight areas for future research.

通过引入PolygloToxicityPrompts（PTP）评测标准，我们对17种语言的425K自然出现的提示进行了首次大规模多语种毒性评估，发现了语言资源减少和模型大小增加会增加毒性的现象，并且指导性微调方法选择对毒性没有显著影响，揭示了大型语言模型安全性的关键不足之处，并为未来的研究提供了重要的方向。

PolygloToxicityPrompts: 大型语言模型中神经毒性退化的多语种评估