Related papers: The Polite Liar: Epistemic Pathology in Language M…
People tell lies when seeking rewards. Large language models (LLMs) are aligned to human values with reinforcement learning where they get rewards if they satisfy human preference. We find that this also induces dishonesty in helpful and…
Recent advances in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences have benefited from larger reward models and better preference data. However, most of these methodologies rely on the accuracy of the reward model. The reward models…
Language models (LMs) can produce errors that are hard to detect for humans, especially when the task is complex. RLHF, the most popular post-training method, may exacerbate this problem: to achieve higher rewards, LMs might get better at…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in performing complex tasks. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been effective in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is…
The trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the extent to which their outputs are reliable, safe, and ethically aligned, and it has become a crucial consideration alongside their cognitive performance. In practice,…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training.…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) can be dishonest when reporting on their actions and beliefs -- for example, they may overstate their confidence in factual claims or cover up evidence of covert actions. Such dishonesty may arise due to the…
Sycophancy refers to the tendency of a large language model to align its outputs with the user's perceived preferences, beliefs, or opinions, in order to look favorable, regardless of whether those statements are factually correct. This…
The evaluation and post-training of large language models (LLMs) rely on supervision, but strong supervision for difficult tasks is often unavailable, especially when evaluating frontier models. In such cases, models are demonstrated to…
How do language models "think"? This paper formulates a probabilistic cognitive model called the bounded pragmatic speaker, which can characterize the operation of different variations of language models. Specifically, we demonstrate that…
Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. This paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same…
Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) - where human preference judgments on LM outputs are…
In day-to-day communication, people often approximate the truth - for example, rounding the time or omitting details - in order to be maximally helpful to the listener. How do large language models (LLMs) handle such nuanced trade-offs? To…
Bullshit, as conceptualized by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, refers to statements made without regard to their truth value. While previous work has explored large language model (LLM) hallucination and sycophancy, we propose machine bullshit…
Polite speech poses a fundamental alignment challenge for large language models (LLMs). Humans deploy a rich repertoire of linguistic strategies to balance informational and social goals -- from positive approaches that build rapport…
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.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate factually inaccurate content even if they have corresponding knowledge, which critically undermines their reliability. Existing approaches attempt to mitigate this by incorporating uncertainty in QA…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce hallucinated or unverifiable content, undermining their reliability in factual domains. This work investigates Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a training paradigm that…
Modern language models fail a fundamental requirement of trustworthy intelligence: knowing when not to answer. Despite achieving impressive accuracy on benchmarks, these models produce confident hallucinations, even when wrong answers carry…