Over the past few years, one of the most notable advancements in AI research has been in foundation models (FMs), headlined by the rise of language models (LMs). However, despite researchers’ attention and the rapid growth in LM application, the capabilities, limitations, and associated risks still need to be better understood. To address these issues, we introduce a new instruction benchmark, MERA, oriented towards the FMs’ performance on the Russian language. The benchmark encompasses 21 evaluation tasks for generative models covering 10 skills and is supplied with private answer scoring to prevent data leakage. The paper introduces a methodology to evaluate FMs and LMs in fixed zero- and few-shot instruction settings that can be extended to other modalities. We propose an evaluation methodology, an open-source code base for the MERA assessment, and a leaderboard with a submission system. We evaluate open LMs as baselines and find they are still far behind the human level. We publicly release MERA to guide forthcoming research, anticipate groundbreaking model features, standardize the evaluation procedure, and address potential ethical concerns and drawbacks.

We present a novel pipeline for the collection of parallel data for the detoxification task. We collect non-toxic paraphrases for over 10,000 English toxic sentences. We also show that this pipeline can be used to distill a large existing corpus of paraphrases to get toxic-neutral sentence pairs. We release two parallel corpora which can be used for the training of detoxification models. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first parallel datasets for this task. We describe our pipeline in detail to make it fast to set up for a new language or domain, thus contributing to faster and easier development of new parallel resources. We train several detoxification models on the collected data and compare them with several baselines and state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. We conduct both automatic and manual evaluations. All models trained on parallel data outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised models by a large margin. This suggests that our novel datasets can boost the performance of detoxification systems.

Detoxification is a task of generating text in polite style while preserving meaning and fluency of the original toxic text. Existing detoxification methods are monolingual i.e. designed to work in one exact language. This work investigates multilingual and cross-lingual detoxification and the behavior of large multilingual models in this setting. Unlike previous works we aim to make large language models able to perform detoxification without direct fine-tuning in a given language. Experiments show that multilingual models are capable of performing multilingual style transfer. However, tested state-of-the-art models are not able to perform cross-lingual detoxification and direct fine-tuning on exact language is currently inevitable and motivating the need of further research in this direction.