# Automatically Exposing Problems with Neural Dialog Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Adversarial NLI: A New Benchmark for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14599/) (2019)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07125/) (2019)
- [Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11932/) (2019)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09977/) (2020)
- [PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01130/) (2019)
- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01541/) (2016)
- [Beyond Goldfish Memory: Long-Term Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07567/) (2021)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Build it Break it Fix it for Dialogue Safety: Robustness from Adversarial Human Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06083/) (2019)
- [Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07079/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Fundamental Limitations of Alignment in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11082/) (2023)
- [Tradeoffs Between Alignment and Helpfulness in Language Models with Steering Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16332/) (2024)
- [Legilimens: Practical and Unified Content Moderation for Large Language Model Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15488/) (2024)
- [Constructing Highly Inductive Contexts for Dialogue Safety through Controllable Reverse Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01810/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural dialog models are known to suffer from problems such as generating unsafe and inconsistent responses. Even though these problems are crucial and prevalent, they are mostly manually identified by model designers through interactions. Recently, some research instructs crowdworkers to goad the bots into triggering such problems. However, humans leverage superficial clues such as hate speech, while leaving systematic problems undercover. In this paper, we propose two methods including reinforcement learning to automatically trigger a dialog model into generating problematic responses. We show the effect of our methods in exposing safety and contradiction issues with state-of-the-art dialog models.