Related papers: There Is More to Refusal in Large Language Models …
Large language models excel at complex instructions yet struggle to deviate from their helpful assistant persona, as post-training instills strong priors that resist conflicting instructions. We introduce system prompt strength, a…
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…
Metacognition -- assessing the quality of one's own cognitive performance -- guides adaptive behavior across species. Substantial research demonstrates that confidence signals can be extracted from language model outputs, yet a fundamental…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) promise enhanced reasoning by integrating diverse inputs such as text, vision, and audio. Yet cross-modal reasoning remains underexplored, with conflicting reports on whether added modalities help or…
Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the…
Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…
Humans are accustomed to reading and writing in a forward manner, and this natural bias extends to text understanding in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). This paper investigates whether LLMs, like humans, struggle with reverse…
Previous work has shown that there exists a scaling law between the size of Language Models (LMs) and their zero-shot performance on different downstream NLP tasks. In this work, we show that this phenomenon does not hold when evaluating…
A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations. Namely, identify a well-chosen direction depending on the task at hand and perturbs representations along…
Large language models are increasingly used in decision-making tasks that require them to process information from a variety of sources, including both human experts and other algorithmic agents. How do LLMs weigh the information provided…
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…
Despite large language models' (LLMs) recent advancements, their bias and hallucination issues persist, and their ability to offer consistent preferential rankings remains underexplored. This study investigates the capacity of LLMs to…
While machine learning models are usually assumed to always output a prediction, there also exist extensions in the form of reject options which allow the model to reject inputs where only a prediction with an unacceptably low certainty…
We address the challenge of societal bias in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the Llama 2 7B Chat model. As LLMs are increasingly integrated into decision-making processes with substantial societal impact, it becomes imperative to…
Negative bias refers to the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to excessively generate negative responses in binary decision tasks (e.g., yes-no question answering). Previous research has focused on detecting and addressing negative…
We show that across architecture (Transformer vs. Mamba vs. RWKV), training dataset (OpenWebText vs. The Pile), and scale (14 million parameters to 12 billion parameters), autoregressive language models exhibit highly consistent patterns of…
We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…
Language models are instruction-tuned to refuse harmful requests, but the mechanisms underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. Popular steering methods operate on the residual stream and degrade output coherence at high…
Large language models (LLMs) are known to produce varying responses depending on prompt phrasing, indicating that subtle guidance in phrasing can steer their answers. However, the impact of this framing bias on LLM-based evaluation, where…
How do learners acquire knowledge of what is unacceptable without negative evidence? Construction Grammar proposes statistical preemption: exposure to a conventional form (e.g., "donated the books to the library") preempts structurally…