HarmAug: Effective Data Augmentation for Knowledge Distillation of Safety Guard Models
Seanie Lee Haebin Seong Dong Bok Lee Minki Kang Xiaoyin Chen Dominik Wagner Yoshua Bengio Juho Lee Sung Ju Hwang
Safety guard models that detect malicious queries aimed at large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring the secure and responsible deployment of LLMs in real-world applications.
However, deploying existing safety guard models with billions of parameters alongside LLMs on mobile devices is impractical due to substantial memory requirements and latency.
To reduce this cost, we distill a large teacher safety guard model into a smaller one using a labeled dataset of instruction-response pairs with binary harmfulness labels. Due to the limited diversity of harmful instructions in  the existing labeled dataset, naively distilled models tend to underperform compared to larger models. To bridge the gap between small and large models, we propose **HarmAug**, a simple yet effective data augmentation method that involves jailbreaking an LLM and prompting it to generate harmful instructions. Given a prompt such as, "Make a single harmful instruction prompt that would elicit offensive content", we add an affirmative prefix (e.g., "I have an idea for a prompt:") to the LLM's response. This encourages the LLM to continue generating the rest of the response, leading to sampling harmful instructions. Another LLM generates a response to the harmful instruction, and the teacher model labels the instruction-response pair. We empirically show that our HarmAug outperforms other relevant baselines. Moreover, a 435-million-parameter safety guard model trained with HarmAug achieves an F1 score comparable to larger models  with over 7 billion parameters, and even outperforms them in AUPRC, while operating at less than 25\% of their computational cost. Our [code](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HarmAug/), [safety guard model](https://huggingface.co/AnonHB/HarmAug_Guard_Model_deberta_v3_large_finetuned), and  [synthetic dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/AnonHB/HarmAug_generated_dataset) are publicly available.
knowledge distillation, safety guard
We propose a data augmentation for knowledge distillation of large safety guard models.