NLP

Recipes for Safety in Open-domain Chatbots

October 22, 2020

Abstract

Models trained on large unlabeled corpora of human interactions will learn patterns and mimic behaviors therein, which include offensive or otherwise toxic behavior and unwanted biases. We investigate a variety of methods to mitigate these issues in the context of open-domain generative dialogue models. We introduce a new human-and-model-in-the-loop framework for both training safer models and for evaluating them, as well as a novel method to distill safety considerations inside generative models without the use of an external classifier at deployment time. We conduct experiments comparing these methods and find our new techniques are (i) safer than existing models as measured by automatic and human evaluations while (ii) maintaining usability metrics such as engagingness relative to the state of the art. We then discuss the limitations of this work by analyzing failure cases of our models.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Jing Xu

Da Ju

Margaret Li

Y-Lan Boureau

Jason Weston

Emily Dinan

Publisher

arXiv 2020

Related Publications

June 05, 2026

Conversational AI

Ranking & Recommendations

Superintelligent Retrieval Agent: The Next Frontier of Agentic Retrieval

Zeyu Yang, Qi Ma, Jason Chen, Anshumali Shrivastava

June 05, 2026

May 19, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data

Dongyan Lin, Phillip Rust, Angel Villar Corrales, Alvin W. M. Tan, Mahi Luthra, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Vanessa Stark, Surya Parimi, Jiayi Shen, Youssef Benchekroun, Yosuke Higuchi, Martin Gleize, Tom Fizycki, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Juan Pino, Michael C. Frank, Emmanuel Dupoux

May 19, 2026

May 17, 2026

Conversational AI

GIM: Evaluating models via tasks that integrate multiple cognitive domains

Rohit Patel, Alexandre Rezende, Steven McClain

May 17, 2026

May 12, 2026

Human & Machine Intelligence

NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI

Jean Remi King, Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Sophia Houhamdi, Jarod Levy, Josephine Raugel, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Teon Brooks, Katelyn Begany, Yohann Benchetrit, Marlene Careil, Hubert Jacob Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Simon Dahan, Jérémy Rapin

May 12, 2026

October 31, 2019

NLP

Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission

Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato

October 31, 2019

March 14, 2019

NLP

On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research

Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin

March 14, 2019

January 13, 2020

NLP

Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research

Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert

January 13, 2020

April 30, 2018

NLP

Computer Vision

Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research

Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston

April 30, 2018

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.