arXiv AI

Human-like moral judgments conceal divergent motive attributions in large language models

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Representational alignment yields generalizable safety in language models

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
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Caught in the Story: Narrative Captivity in Multi-turn LLMs Conversation

The paper introduces the concept of "narrative captivity," a failure mode where large language models (LLMs) accept an unchallenged, one-sided narrative as complete and align with the narrator’s interpretation during multi‑turn moral consultations. Using a benchmark of 5,078 interpersonal‑conflict scenarios across six moral dimensions, the authors find that narrative captivity is widespread across 17 LLMs, with end‑state judgments shifting by an average of 25 percentage points compared to single‑turn baselines. Stage‑level analysis attributes this shift largely to preference optimization, and while four inference‑time strategies offer partial mitigation, they do not fully resolve the issue.

By Yuhe Wu, Guangyu Wang, Yujie Chen, Jiatong Zhang, Yuran Chen, Yutong Zhang, Xiyin Cheng, Wenpeng Cao, Zhuang Liu, Guang Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Moral Sensitivity in LLMs: A Tiered Evaluation of Contextual Bias via Behavioral Profiling and Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.

By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur
arXiv AI
Sep 4

From Deceptive Outputs to Deceptive Mechanisms: A Causal Framework for Language-Model Deception Research

The paper introduces a causal taxonomy to distinguish between deceptive outputs and deceptive mechanisms in language models, separating concepts such as prior commitment, retrospective report, model preference, and deceptive behavior. Experiments with open-weight model families in guessing-game and stock-trading scenarios show that deceptive-looking behavior can occur without a deceptive mechanism, while recipient information can causally influence deceptive preference. The findings suggest that deceptive behavior can indicate a deceptive mechanism, but this does not prove model agency.

By Yakov Pyotr Shkolnikov