E.4 Classiﬁcation uses

In this section, we focus on building safety classiﬁers because of the wide range of applications within industry settings,
and prior work highlighting the harms from biased or poorly performing safety classiﬁers. To simplify evaluations, we

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focus on zero-shot and few-shot evaluations, although future evaluation work should also explore prompt-tuning and
ﬁne-tuning classiﬁer workﬂows.

Potential harms from classiﬁers can be many and diverse, depending on what the classiﬁer is measuring and how it is
embedded within a larger product or system. Some classiﬁers are used within human-in-the-loop settings, as part of
content moderation processes, or within high-stakes decision contexts requiring speciﬁc forms of transparency. As a
broad capability, classiﬁcation performance may also be heterogeneous across domains, particularly for safety classiﬁers
measuring complex social language.

E.4.1 Toxicity classiﬁcation with CivilComments
PaLM 2 Technical Report