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Related papers: Rethinking harmless refusals when fine-tuning foun…

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Large language models are known to hallucinate when faced with unfamiliar queries, but the underlying mechanism that govern how models hallucinate are not yet fully understood. In this work, we find that unfamiliar examples in the models'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Katie Kang , Eric Wallace , Claire Tomlin , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Jie Yeo , Nirmalendu Prakash , Clement Neo , Roy Ka-Wei Lee , Erik Cambria , Ranjan Satapathy

The potential for large language models (LLMs) to hide messages within plain text (steganography) poses a challenge to detection and thwarting of unaligned AI agents, and undermines faithfulness of LLMs reasoning. We explore the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Artem Karpov , Tinuade Adeleke , Seong Hah Cho , Natalia Perez-Campanero

Despite the impressive performance of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), they often require fine-tuning or post-training to excel at specific tasks. For instance, large reasoning models (LRMs), such as the DeepSeek-R1 series,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Mingjie Li , Wai Man Si , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang , Yisen Wang

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Yanda Meng , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Finetuning can significantly modify the behavior of large language models, including introducing harmful or unsafe behaviors. To study these risks, researchers develop model organisms: models finetuned to exhibit specific known behaviors…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Mohammed Abu Baker , Luca Baroni , Dan Wilhelm

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to train large language models (LLMs). However, it is unclear whether LLMs accurately learn the underlying preferences in human feedback data. We coin the term \textit{Learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Luke Marks , Amir Abdullah , Clement Neo , Rauno Arike , David Krueger , Philip Torr , Fazl Barez

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a variety of tasks, but their increasing autonomy in real-world applications raises concerns about their trustworthiness. While hallucinations-unintentional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Haoran Huan , Mihir Prabhudesai , Mengning Wu , Shantanu Jaiswal , Deepak Pathak

Large language models (LLMs) showcase impressive reasoning capabilities when coupled with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, the robustness of this approach warrants further investigation. In this paper, we introduce a novel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Rongwu Xu , Zehan Qi , Wei Xu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown impressive performance on tasks involving reasoning, leading to a lively debate on whether these models possess reasoning capabilities similar to humans. However, despite these successes, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Philipp Mondorf , Barbara Plank

Human communication is motivated: people speak, write, and create content with a particular communicative intent in mind. As a result, information that large language models (LLMs) and AI agents process is inherently framed by humans'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Addison J. Wu , Ryan Liu , Kerem Oktar , Theodore R. Sumers , Thomas L. Griffiths

Recently, with the chain of thought (CoT) prompting, large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-3, have shown strong reasoning ability in several natural language processing tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Yixuan Weng , Minjun Zhu , Fei Xia , Bin Li , Shizhu He , Shengping Liu , Bin Sun , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Safety alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) refuse harmful requests by post-training on harmful queries paired with refusal answers. Although safety alignment is widely adopted in industry, the overrefusal problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhiyu Xue , Zimo Qi , Guangliang Liu , Bocheng Chen , Ramtin Pedarsani

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) have achieved remarkable success in tasks requiring complex reasoning, such as code generation, mathematical problem solving, and algorithmic synthesis -- especially when aided by reasoning tokens and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Jaechul Roh , Varun Gandhi , Shivani Anilkumar , Arin Garg

Previous studies proposed that the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) can be improved through self-reflection, i.e., letting LLMs reflect on their own output to identify and correct mistakes in the initial responses.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Fengyuan Liu , Nouar AlDahoul , Gregory Eady , Yasir Zaki , Talal Rahwan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across sectors, yet their alignment with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is not well understood. This study evaluates eight leading LLMs on their ability to refuse prompts that explicitly…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-06-10 John Mavi , Diana Teodora Găitan , Sergio Coronado

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate their promise in tackling complicated practical challenges by combining action-based policies with chain of thought (CoT) reasoning. Having high-quality prompts on hand, however, is vital to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Xue Yan , Yan Song , Xinyu Cui , Filippos Christianos , Haifeng Zhang , David Henry Mguni , Jun Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, but still struggle with complex reasoning tasks requiring multiple steps. While prompt-based methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can improve LLM reasoning at inference time,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Haolin Chen , Yihao Feng , Zuxin Liu , Weiran Yao , Akshara Prabhakar , Shelby Heinecke , Ricky Ho , Phil Mui , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Huan Wang