arXiv Machine Learning

Aligning Language Models with Observational Data: Opportunities and Risks from a Causal Perspective

The paper discusses how large language models (LLMs) can be fine‑tuned with observational data to improve alignment with human preferences and business goals. It highlights that directly using such data can cause models to learn spurious correlations, and introduces DeconfoundLM, a method that removes known confounders from reward signals. Experiments show that DeconfoundLM better recovers causal relationships and outperforms baseline methods by over 16% in objective score when confounding is present.

arXiv AI

Sep 2

Medical Causal Hypothesis Verification with Large Language Models

The paper "Medical Causal Hypothesis Verification with Large Language Models" reports a small-scale study evaluating eight LLMs on 17 medical causal hypotheses. The authors introduce an evaluation framework and annotate 1,067 evidence points across six criteria, using nine metrics to assess performance. Results show that while LLMs have strong recall, they frequently fail to provide valid scientific articles, evidence, or reject unsupported hypotheses, revealing a critical limitation for their use in healthcare.

By Safiyyah Ahmed, Abrar Ansari, Md Aminul Islam, Elena Zheleva

llms

arXiv AI

Jul 23

Information Discernment in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used with external knowledge sources like the internet.

By Joshua Ashkinaze, Laura Kurek, Alina Faisal, Tongyuan Miao, Mariam Joseph, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert

llms benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 18

DRIFT: Refining Instruction Data via On-Policy Data Attribution

arXiv:2606. 18307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing the training data distribution for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) dictates the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs).

By Zefan Wang, Lincheng Li, Tianyu Yu, Yuan Yao

llms fine-tuning safety

arXiv AI

Jun 17

Statistical Foundations of LLM-based A/B Testing: A Surrogacy Framework for Human Causal Inference

arXiv:2606. 17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost.

By Joel Persson, M{\aa}rten Schultzberg, Sebastian Ankargren

llms safety

arXiv AI

Oct 12

CoBe: A Benchmark For Conversational Counterfactual Text Editing

CoBe is a benchmark that evaluates a model’s ability to perform conversational counterfactual text editing, requiring the model to revise a given scenario based on a hypothetical change while preserving unaffected facts. The dataset includes 2,000 questions across domains such as healthcare, science, engineering, business, and everyday life. Experiments show that current models often default to associational generation rather than maintaining causal structure, and performance does not reliably improve with larger model size or longer outputs.

By Arvind Raghavan, Inwoo Hwang, Shreyas Havaldar, Kai-Zhan Lee, Aurghya Maiti, Yushu Pan, Jeffrey Wu, Mingxuan Li, Elias Bareinboim

benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

3d ago

Evaluating Causal Reasoning in LLMs: A Case Study in the Challenges of Procedural Generation

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) truly perform formal causal reasoning by testing them on datasets generated by the CLadder framework. It finds that LLMs and even simple models like random forests can achieve high accuracy on CLadder data, largely due to superficial, highly predictive patterns embedded by the generator. The authors argue that strong performance on CLadder likely reflects exploitation of these patterns rather than genuine causal reasoning, and that many commercial LLMs show brittle results when critical text is removed.

By Justin Clarke, Isha Karn, Patrick Murray, KJ Hill, David Jensen

llms benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 6

Can Post-Training Transform LLMs into Causal Reasoners?

arXiv:2602. 06337v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference is essential for decision-making but remains challenging for non-experts.

By Junqi Chen, Sirui Chen, Chaochao Lu

llms reinforcement-learning fine-tuning benchmarks

arXiv Computation and Language

Sep 14

On The Effectiveness-Fluency Trade-Off In LLM Conditioning: A Systematic Study

arXiv:2606.12234v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Controlling the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a central challenge for their reliable deployment, yet a clear understanding of the invol...

By Iuri Macocco, Pau Rodr\'iguez, Arno Blaas, Luca Zappella, Marco Baroni, Xavier Suau

llms fine-tuning

arXiv Computation and Language

Oct 22

From Value Conditioning to Behavioral Shift: Lightweight Value Alignment of LLMs

The paper investigates whether fine‑tuning large language models (LLMs) on value survey responses can shift their value‑conditioned outputs and downstream behavior. Researchers first estimate baseline value profiles for several open‑source LLMs using the ten Schwartz values, then fine‑tune the models on survey‑style supervision that selectively alters target value ratings while preserving non‑target values. The resulting shifts are evaluated on held‑out survey questions and on out‑of‑domain behavioral proxies, such as a contextual moral‑judgment benchmark from Reddit AITA posts and a text‑based interactive decision‑making benchmark. The study finds that survey‑based supervision can change both survey responses and downstream behavior, but the transfer is strongly model‑ and value‑dependent and influenced by how value descriptions are framed.

By Shangrui Nie, Florian Mai, David Kacz\'er, Charles Welch, Zhixue Zhao, Lucie Flek

llms fine-tuning benchmarks safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 17

Addressing Benchmarking Gaps in Large Language Models for Health and Medicine with Dynamic Red-Teaming

arXiv:2508. 00923v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer health-related questions and support healthcare workflows, yet evidence for their safety still relies heavily on static benchmarks that can rapidly become obsolete or be optimized against.

By Jiazhen Pan (Cherise), Bailiang Jian (Cherise), Paul Hager (Cherise), Yundi Zhang (Cherise), Che Liu (Cherise), Friederike Jungmann (Cherise), Hongwei Bran Li (Cherise), Julian Canisius (Cherise), Chenyu You (Cherise), Junde Wu (Cherise), Jiayuan Zhu (Cherise), Fenglin Liu (Cherise), Yuyuan Liu (Cherise), Niklas Bubeck (Cherise), Moritz Knolle (Cherise), Chen (Cherise), Chen (Cherise), Christian Wachinger, Zhenyu Gong, Cheng Ouyang, Georgios Kaissis, Benedikt Wiestler, Daniel Rueckert

llms agents benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Aug 6

Memorization in Large Language Models in Medicine: Prevalence, Characteristics, and Implications

arXiv:2509. 08604v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medicine, with many studies adapting them through continued pre-training or fine-tuning on medical data to enhance domain-specific accuracy and safety.

By Anran Li, Lingfei Qian, Mengmeng Du, Yu Yin, Yan Hu, Zihao Sun, Yihang Fu, Hyunjae Kim, Erica Stutz, Xuguang Ai, Qianqian Xie, Rui Zhu, Jimin Huang, Yifan Yang, Siru Liu, Yih-Chung Tham, Lucila Ohno-Machado, Hyunghoon Cho, Zhiyong Lu, Hua Xu, Qingyu Chen

llms fine-tuning benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Jun 11

Models That Know How Evaluations Are Designed Score Safer

arXiv:2605. 28591v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings.

By Katharina Deckenbach, Haritz Puerto, Jonas Geiping, Sahar Abdelnabi

fine-tuning benchmarks safety

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