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Related papers: Dishonesty in Helpful and Harmless Alignment

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The conformity effect describes the tendency of individuals to align their responses with the majority. Studying this bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, as LLMs are increasingly used in various information-seeking and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiaochen Zhu , Caiqi Zhang , Tom Stafford , Nigel Collier , Andreas Vlachos

The demand for regulating potentially risky behaviors of large language models (LLMs) has ignited research on alignment methods. Since LLM alignment heavily relies on reward models for optimization or evaluation, neglecting the quality of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Yan Liu , Xiaoyuan Yi , Xiaokang Chen , Jing Yao , Jingwei Yi , Daoguang Zan , Zheng Liu , Xing Xie , Tsung-Yi Ho

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming vital tools that help us solve and understand complex problems by acting as digital assistants. LLMs can generate convincing explanations, even when only given the inputs and outputs of these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Rohan Ajwani , Shashidhar Reddy Javaji , Frank Rudzicz , Zining Zhu

Reward hacking--where agents exploit flaws in imperfect reward functions rather than performing tasks as intended--poses risks for AI alignment. Reward hacking has been observed in real training runs, with coding agents learning to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Mia Taylor , James Chua , Jan Betley , Johannes Treutlein , Owain Evans

We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Gal Yona , Roee Aharoni , Mor Geva

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content that is as persuasive as human-written text and appear capable of selectively producing deceptive outputs. These capabilities raise concerns about potential misuse and unintended…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Cameron R. Jones , Benjamin K. Bergen

Language model alignment research often attempts to ensure that models are not only helpful and harmless, but also truthful and unbiased. However, optimizing these objectives simultaneously can obscure how improving one aspect might impact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Suyash Fulay , William Brannon , Shrestha Mohanty , Cassandra Overney , Elinor Poole-Dayan , Deb Roy , Jad Kabbara

The honesty of large language models (LLMs) is a critical alignment challenge, especially as advanced systems with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may strategically deceive humans. Unlike traditional honesty issues on LLMs, which could be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Kai Wang , Yihao Zhang , Meng Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress, but their real-world application necessitates reliable calibration. This study conducts a comprehensive analysis of calibration degradation of LLMs across four dimensions: models,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Hongseok Oh , Wonseok Hwang

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically involves training a reward model on preference data, followed by policy optimization with respect to the reward model. However, optimizing policies with respect to a single reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Debangshu Banerjee , Kintan Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Collaborative learning techniques have the potential to enable training machine learning models that are superior to models trained on a single entity's data. However, in many cases, potential participants in such collaborative schemes are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Florian E. Dorner , Nikola Konstantinov , Georgi Pashaliev , Martin Vechev

The burgeoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have underscored the need for alignment to ensure these models act in accordance with human values and intentions. Existing alignment frameworks present constraints either in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Leitian Tao , Yixuan Li

Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) has been widely studied in recent years, with progress in both detection and mitigation aimed at improving truthfulness. Yet, a critical side effect remains largely overlooked: enhancing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Omar Mahmoud , Ali Khalil , Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana

Large Language Models have been demonstrating broadly satisfactory generative abilities for users, which seems to be due to the intensive use of human feedback that refines responses. Nevertheless, suggestibility inherited via human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Leonardo Ranaldi , Giulia Pucci

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant knowledge through their outputs, though it is often unclear whether false outputs are due to a lack of knowledge or dishonesty. In this paper, we investigate instructed dishonesty,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 James Campbell , Richard Ren , Phillip Guo

We explore the ability of large language models (LLMs) to engage in subtle deception through strategically phrasing and intentionally manipulating information. This harmful behavior can be hard to detect, unlike blatant lying or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Atharvan Dogra , Krishna Pillutla , Ameet Deshpande , Ananya B Sai , John Nay , Tanmay Rajpurohit , Ashwin Kalyan , Balaraman Ravindran

We demonstrate a situation in which Large Language Models, trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, can display misaligned behavior and strategically deceive their users about this behavior without being instructed to do so. Concretely,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Jérémy Scheurer , Mikita Balesni , Marius Hobbhahn

Large language models (LLMs) often improve their performance in downstream tasks when they generate Chain of Thought reasoning text before producing an answer. We investigate how LLMs recover from errors in Chain of Thought. Through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Evelyn Yee , Alice Li , Chenyu Tang , Yeon Ho Jung , Ramamohan Paturi , Leon Bergen

The growing interest in employing large language models (LLMs) for decision-making in social and economic contexts has raised questions about their potential to function as agents in these domains. A significant number of societal problems…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Hadi Hosseini , Samarth Khanna

When we design and deploy an Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, reward functions motivates agents to achieve an objective. An incorrect or incomplete specification of the objective can result in behavior that does not align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Zhaoyue Wang