cs.LGMay 14, 2026

NodeSynth: Socially Aligned Synthetic Data for AI Evaluation

Authors: Qazi Mamunur RashidXuan YangZhengzhe YangYanzhou PanErin van LiemtDarlene NealKshitij PancholiJamila Smith-Loud

Organizations: Google Research · Google · Google Deepmind

Abstract

Recent advancements in generative AI facilitate large-scale synthetic data generation for model evaluation. However, without targeted approaches, these datasets often lack the sociotechnical nuance required for sensitive domains. We introduce NodeSynth, an evidence-grounded methodology that generates socially relevant synthetic queries by leveraging a fine-tuned taxonomy generator (TaG) anchored in real-world evidence. Evaluated against four mainstream LLMs (e.g., Claude 4.5 Haiku), NodeSynth elicited failure rates up to five times higher than human-authored benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that our granular taxonomic expansion significantly drives these failure rates, while independent validation reveals critical deficiencies in prominent guard models (e.g., Llama-Guard-3). We open-source our end-to-end research prototype and datasets to enable scalable, high-stakes model evaluation and targeted safety interventions (https://github.com/google-research/nodesynth).

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