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Related papers: Auditing language models for hidden objectives

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Alignment tuning has enabled large language models to excel in reasoning, instruction-following, and minimizing harmful generations. However, despite their widespread deployment, these models exhibit a monolingual bias, raising concerns…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Nikhil Verma , Manasa Bharadwaj

We study AI alignment through the lens of law-and-economics models of deterrence and enforcement. In these models, misconduct is not treated as an external failure, but as a strategic response to incentives: an actor weighs the gain from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Rohit Agarwal , Joshua Lin , Mark Braverman , Elad Hazan

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remains vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit spurious correlations in learned reward models to achieve high scores while violating human intent. Existing mitigations rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mohammad Beigi , Ming Jin , Junshan Zhang , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a deluge of text data with limited quality control. As a result, LLMs can exhibit unintended or even harmful behaviours, such as leaking information, fake news or hate speech. Countermeasures,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Jingtong Su , Julia Kempe , Karen Ullrich

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun

Reinforcement learning has seen wide success in finetuning large language models to better align with instructions via human feedback. The so-called algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) demonstrates impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Tianjun Zhang , Fangchen Liu , Justin Wong , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…

Applications of multilevel models usually result in binary classification within groups or hierarchies based on a set of input features. For transparent and ethical applications of such models, sound audit frameworks need to be developed.…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Debarati Bhaumik , Diptish Dey , Subhradeep Kayal

Reward models play a key role in aligning language model applications towards human preferences. However, this setup creates an incentive for the language model to exploit errors in the reward model to achieve high estimated reward, a…

We study estimation and statistical inference for reward models used in aligning large language models (LLMs). A key component of LLM alignment is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where humans compare pairs of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-04 Pangpang Liu , Junwei Lu , Will Wei Sun

Language Models (LMs) may acquire harmful knowledge, and yet feign ignorance of these topics when under audit. Inspired by the recent discovery of deception-related behaviour patterns in LMs, we aim to train classifiers that detect when a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Dhananjay Ashok , Ruth-Ann Armstrong , Jonathan May

AI model alignment is crucial due to inadvertent biases in training data and the underspecified machine learning pipeline, where models with excellent test metrics may not meet end-user requirements. While post-training alignment via human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 William Overman , Jacqueline Jil Vallon , Mohsen Bayati

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-ended, real-world environments where inputs are messy, underspecified, and not always trustworthy. Unlike curated benchmarks, these settings frequently involve…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Qianqi Yan , Hongquan Li , Shan Jiang , Yang Zhao , Xinze Guan , Ching-Chen Kuo , Xin Eric Wang

Large language models optimized with techniques like RLHF have achieved good alignment in being helpful and harmless. However, post-alignment, these language models often exhibit overconfidence, where the expressed confidence does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Mozhi Zhang , Mianqiu Huang , Rundong Shi , Linsen Guo , Chong Peng , Peng Yan , Yaqian Zhou , Xipeng Qiu

Aligning large language models to human preferences is inherently multidimensional, yet most pipelines collapse heterogeneous signals into a single optimizeable objective. We seek to answer what it would take to simultaneously align a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Yiran Shen , Yu Xia , Jonathan Chang , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

While advances in fairness and alignment have helped mitigate overt biases exhibited by large language models (LLMs) when explicitly prompted, we hypothesize that these models may still exhibit implicit biases when simulating human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Yuxuan Li , Hirokazu Shirado , Sauvik Das

Numerous previous studies have sought to determine to what extent language models, pretrained on natural language text, can serve as useful models of human cognition. In this paper, we are interested in the opposite question: whether we can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Samuel Kiegeland , Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox , Afra Amini , David Robert Reich , Ryan Cotterell

Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays expected to generate content aligned with human preferences. Current work focuses on alignment at model training time, through techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF).…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 James Y. Huang , Sailik Sengupta , Daniele Bonadiman , Yi-An Lai , Arshit Gupta , Nikolaos Pappas , Saab Mansour , Katrin Kirchhoff , Dan Roth

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal