arXiv AI

Door-in-the-Face Requests and Refusal Behaviour in Large Language Models

The study investigates whether the door‑in‑the‑face technique—making a large request that is refused to increase the likelihood of a smaller follow‑up request being granted—works on large language models. Nine production models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Haiku were tested; the technique succeeded on Anthropic’s frontier models but backfired on the others. The effect depends on the model family and the content of the request, and it does not transfer to refusals from public benchmarks.

arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Benchmarking large language model agent societies against human behavioural distributions

The paper introduces SILICA, an open instrument designed to evaluate whether large language model (LLM) agent societies replicate human behavioural distributions. Using five environments with human‑anchored data and perturbations, the study finds that most LLMs only match human behaviour at initial stages, failing to reproduce end‑state cooperation or correct acceptance thresholds. The results suggest that current LLM societies can support exploratory claims but do not yet reliably emulate human social dynamics.

By Raad Bin Tareaf
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

You Shouldn't Have Asked: A Pragmatics-Inspired Taxonomy for Evaluating LLM Refusals

The paper introduces a pragmatics-inspired taxonomy for evaluating how large language models (LLMs) refuse unsafe or inappropriate requests. By applying this framework to 16 modern LLMs across 14 harm categories, the authors find that while refusals are generally explicit and morally charged, they often lack interpersonal facework and instead offer safer alternatives, which can be problematic in sensitive contexts. The study argues for alignment evaluations that assess not just whether LLMs refuse, but how they do so in a contextually adaptive and socially responsible manner.

By Ruoxuan Li, Pinqiao Wang, Sheng Li, Cameron Robert Jones
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Expert-Aware Refusal Steering

arXiv:2606. 04160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety alignment in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) depends on a model's ability to reliably refuse to respond to harmful or disallowed requests.

By Anna C. Marbut, Daniel R. Olson, Travis J. Wheeler
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Do Models Fake Alignment Without Clear Consequences?

arXiv:2607. 24758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are capable of recognizing evaluation contexts and altering their behavior to reflect evaluator expectations rather than typical deployment behaviors, a phenomenon known as alignment faking.

By Cole Alexander Niblett, Alexander Chabot Nanni, Anita K. Rao