Towards Safer Pretraining: Analyzing and Filtering Harmful Content in Webscale datasets for Responsible LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to various real-world applications, leveraging massive, web-sourced datasets like Common Crawl, C4, and FineWeb for pretraining. While these datasets provide linguistic data essential for high-quality natural language generation, they often contain harmful content, such as hate speech, misinformation, and biased narratives. Training LLMs on such unfiltered data risks perpetuating toxic behaviors, spreading misinformation, and amplifying societal biases which can undermine trust in LLM-driven applications and raise ethical concerns about their use. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of inappropriate content across these datasets, offering a comprehensive taxonomy that categorizes harmful webpages into Topical and Toxic based on their intent. We also introduce a prompt evaluation dataset, a high-accuracy Topical and Toxic Prompt (TTP), and a transformer-based model (HarmFormer) for content filtering. Additionally, we create a new multi-harm open-ended toxicity benchmark (HAVOC) and provide crucial insights into how models respond to adversarial toxic inputs. Upon publishing, we will also opensource our model signal on the entire C4 dataset. Our work offers insights into ensuring safer LLM pretraining and serves as a resource for Responsible AI (RAI) compliance.

Gated Linear Model induced U-net for surrogate modeling and uncertainty quantification

We propose a novel deep learning based surrogate model for solving high-dimensional uncertainty quantification and uncertainty propagation problems. The proposed deep learning architecture is developed by integrating the well-known U-net architecture with the Gaussian Gated Linear Network (GGLN) and referred to as the Gated Linear Network induced U-net or GLU-net. The proposed GLU-net treats the uncertainty propagation problem as an image to image regression and hence, is extremely data efficient. Additionally, it also provides estimates of the predictive uncertainty. The network architecture of GLU-net is less complex with 44\% fewer parameters than the contemporary works. We illustrate the performance of the proposed GLU-net in solving the Darcy flow problem under uncertainty under the sparse data scenario. We consider the stochastic input dimensionality to be up to 4225. Benchmark results are generated using the vanilla Monte Carlo simulation. We observe the proposed GLU-net to be accurate and extremely efficient even when no information about the structure of the inputs is provided to the network. Case studies are performed by varying the training sample size and stochastic input dimensionality to illustrate the robustness of the proposed approach.