The paper argues that AI alignment depends on a system’s ability to exhibit a coherent moral policy—stable, monotonic, decisive, and Pareto‑viable—rather than on any specific moral standard. The authors test nine large language models across varied moral scenarios and find that none maintain consistent verdicts, with surface‑form changes causing up to 99% shifts in outcomes. This indicates that current LLM agents lack the structural moral competence required for meaningful alignment.
By Arno Libert, Derck W. E. Prinzhorn, Daan R. Henselmans
The paper argues that aligning large language models (LLMs) at the level of latent representations—specifically by matching their internal categorization of moral concepts to human prototype-based judgments—improves safety. Current alignment methods that focus on observable responses fail to preserve fine-grained moral categorization, leaving models vulnerable to adversarial rephrasings. By optimizing representational similarity, the authors demonstrate that LLMs can maintain more robust moral categorization and exhibit better adversarial robustness across multiple benchmarks and model sizes.
By Lingyu Li, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang, Xia Hu
The paper investigates how large language models encode moral knowledge by training linear probes for each Moral Foundations Theory category and analyzing their geometric relationships. It finds that the model’s moral directions are largely independent yet share a common component, indicating integration rather than collapse into a single detector. This structure is consistent across architectures, emerges early in pre‑training, and reflects corpus statistics rather than the individualizing/binding distinction of Moral Foundations Theory.
arXiv:2603. 00048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive applications including psychological support, healthcare, and high-stakes decision-making.
By Erica Coppolillo, Emilio Ferrara
The article argues that current evaluations of large language models’ moral competence focus mainly on whether outputs align with human moral values—the so‑called moral value problem—while neglecting the moral norm problem, which concerns the models’ ability to identify and apply context‑sensitive moral norms. It attributes this imbalance to the field’s reliance on descriptive ethics frameworks that emphasize value representation over normative application. The authors review existing benchmarks, highlight three gaps—lack of ground‑truth norm data, insufficient evaluation of intermediate reasoning, and limited focus on context‑relevant features—and propose a research agenda to develop formal normative representations, expert‑annotated datasets, and evaluation protocols that distinguish between value‑level and norm‑level competence.
By Aidan Kierans, Ritam Dutt, Kaley Rittichier, Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Avijit Ghosh
The study investigates how large language models encode moral knowledge by training linear probes for each category of Moral Foundations Theory. It finds that the model’s representations for different moral foundations occupy distinct, largely independent dimensions yet share a common positive component, indicating an integrated but nuanced moral structure. This geometry is consistent across model architectures and scales, emerges early in pre‑training, and reflects corpus statistics rather than the individualizing/binding distinction of the theory.
By Orion Reblitz-Richardson
arXiv:2601. 21433v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models are increasingly consulted on ethically consequential questions, yet the stance a model expresses may not survive a change in framing.
By Katherine Elkins, Jon Chun
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) assess politeness in ways that match human judgments. Using two English datasets—one with continuous ratings and another with three‑way categorical labels—the authors find that LLMs agree more with each other than with humans. They observe that model–human alignment depends on explicit linguistic cues, while misaligned cases often involve rapport‑building strategies. Additionally, models tend to overproduce Neutral labels and underpredict Impolite labels, a pattern that persists even when expert consensus is used as a reference.
arXiv:2606. 12754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment?
By Danica Dillion, Chen Cecilia Liu, Baihui Wang, Daniele Barolo, Tanmay Rajore, Niket Tandon, Pranathi Ravikumar, Kurt Gray
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) assess politeness in ways that match human judgments. Using two English datasets—one with continuous ratings and another with three‑way categorical labels—the authors compare seven LLMs to human annotations. They find that models agree more with each other than with humans, show systematic neutral bias in categorical predictions, and that alignment varies with explicit linguistic cues and rapport‑building strategies.
By Rong Wang, Kun Sun, Yadong Guo
arXiv:2608. 08061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The key question in moral judgement is not simply whether someone chooses the "right" answer, but how they decide what matters most when moral principles conflict.
By Siddarth Singh, Victoria Williams, Simon Rosen, Ebenezer Gelo, Helen Sarah Robertson, Ibrahim Suder, Benjamin Rosman, Geraud Nangue Tasse, Steven James
arXiv:2608.28610v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Existing LLM moral evaluations typically present models with isolated moral vignettes and elicit a single-shot decision, neglecting a factor known to p...
By Fangyuan Zhang, Dong Yu, Pengyuan Liu