arXiv AI

Explaining Intrinsic Moral Self-Correction with Mechanistic Interpretability

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 7

Moral Competence Before Moral Content: Why LLM Agents Lack the Prerequisites for Coherent Alignment

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
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 Computation and Language
Sep 4

Less Is Moral: A CHARMing Framework for Moral Foundations Detection in Endorsement Behaviour

The paper introduces CHARM, a lightweight fine‑tuned language model framework for detecting moral foundations in text. CHARM combines MAC cross‑attention, rationale alignment, and hate‑speech modulation to operationalize distinct psychological constructs, achieving up to 15.3% higher AUC in‑domain and outperforming supervised baselines on all out‑of‑domain datasets. The authors demonstrate CHARM’s scalability by applying it to large‑scale COVID‑19 Twitter data, revealing a strong link between moral value alignment and online endorsement behavior.

By Huixiang Fu, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Adaptive Multi-Value Control in LLMs via Causal Activation Steering

The paper introduces AIMES, a framework for adaptive multi-value activation steering in large language models. AIMES builds layer‑specific bipolar directions for moral‑foundation values and uses intermediate‑layer vocabulary readouts as online observers to guide a controller that adjusts intervention strengths at each decoding step. Experiments across instruction‑tuned model families show that AIMES achieves depth‑dependent advantages over fixed joint steering and prompt‑based steering, with smaller activation‑space interventions and comparable response quality.

By Payel Bhattacharjee, Ravi Tandon