Related papers: Forecasting Rare Language Model Behaviors
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in everyday decision-making, their safety responsibilities extend beyond reacting to explicit harmful intent toward anticipating unintended but consequential risks. In this work, we…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…
We investigate the predictability of large language model (LLM) capabilities: given records of past experiments using different model families, numbers of parameters, tasks, and numbers of in-context examples, can we accurately predict LLM…
The current fascination with large language models, or LLMs, derives from the fact that many users lack the expertise to evaluate the quality of the generated text. LLMs may therefore appear more capable than they actually are. The…
Large-scale surveys are essential tools for informing social science research and policy, but running surveys is costly and time-intensive. If we could accurately simulate group-level survey results, this would therefore be very valuable to…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable adaptability to diverse tasks, by leveraging context prompts containing instructions, or minimal input-output examples. However, recent work revealed they also exhibit label bias -- an…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented emergent capabilities, including content generation, translation, and simulation of human behavior. Field experiments, on the other hand, are widely employed in social studies to…
Randomized controlled trials are a cornerstone of medicine and the social sciences as they enable reliable estimates of causal effects. However, they are costly and time-consuming to conduct, motivating interest in predicting causal effects…
Hallucinations are a common issue that undermine the reliability of large language models (LLMs). Recent studies have identified a specific subset of hallucinations, known as confabulations, which arise due to predictive uncertainty of…
Large language models~(LLMs) have greatly advanced the frontiers of artificial intelligence, attaining remarkable improvement in model capacity. To assess the model performance, a typical approach is to construct evaluation benchmarks for…
Large language models are rapidly transforming social science research by enabling the automation of labor-intensive tasks like data annotation and text analysis. However, LLM outputs vary significantly depending on the implementation…
Large language models offer new ways of empowering people to program robot applications-namely, code generation via prompting. However, the code generated by LLMs is susceptible to errors. This work reports a preliminary exploration that…
Recent work has investigated the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) as zero-shot models for generating individual-level characteristics (e.g., to serve as risk models or augment survey datasets). However, when should a user have…
Recent advances in language models (LMs) have led to significant improvements in quality on complex NLP tasks, but at the expense of increased inference costs. Cascading offers a simple strategy to achieve more favorable cost-quality…
The text generated by large language models is commonly controlled by prompting, where a prompt prepended to a user's query guides the model's output. The prompts used by companies to guide their models are often treated as secrets, to be…
Fine-tuning language models is commonly believed to inevitably harm their safety, i.e., refusing to respond to harmful user requests, even when using harmless datasets, thus requiring additional safety measures. We challenge this belief…
Web question answering (QA) has become an indispensable component in modern search systems, which can significantly improve users' search experience by providing a direct answer to users' information need. This could be achieved by applying…
As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These…
Despite the growing demand for eliciting uncertainty from large language models (LLMs), empirical evidence suggests that LLM behavior is not always adequately captured by the elicitation techniques developed under the classical…
A major risk of using language models in practical applications is their tendency to hallucinate incorrect statements. Hallucinations are often attributed to knowledge gaps in LMs, but we hypothesize that in some cases, when justifying…