Improving Few-shot Generalization of Safety Classifiers via Data
  Augmented Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Ananth Balashankar Xiao Ma Aradhana Sinha Ahmad Beirami Yao Qin Jilin Chen Alex Beutel
As large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted, new safety issues and
policies emerge, to which existing safety classifiers do not generalize well.
If we have only observed a few examples of violations of a new safety rule, how
can we build a classifier to detect violations? In this paper, we study the
novel setting of domain-generalized few-shot learning for LLM-based text safety
classifiers. Unlike prior few-shot work, these new safety issues can be hard to
uncover and we do not get to choose the few examples. We demonstrate that
existing few-shot techniques do not perform well in this setting, and rather we
propose to do parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) combined with augmenting
training data based on similar examples in prior existing rules. We empirically
show that our approach of similarity-based data-augmentation + prompt-tuning
(DAPT) consistently outperforms baselines that either do not rely on data
augmentation or on PEFT by 7-17% F1 score in the Social Chemistry moral
judgement and 9-13% AUC in the Toxicity detection tasks, even when the new rule
is loosely correlated with existing ones.