arXiv AI

How Does Alignment Tuning Shape Representations of Sycophancy and Related Cue-Induced Biases in LLMs?

arXiv:2607. 18114v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 20

How Does Alignment Tuning Shape Representations of Sycophancy and Related Cue-Induced Biases in LLMs?

Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer. We study where this susceptibility, spanning sycophancy and related cue-induced biases, lives inside the model.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

What the "Spotless" Mind Remembers: How Knowledge Entanglement Shapes What Leaks After Unlearning in LLMs

The paper investigates how the structural entanglement of facts within a large language model’s knowledge base influences whether those facts leak after unlearning. Using two unlearning algorithms (WHP and GA+KL) across fictional and real-world datasets and multiple model sizes, the authors find that highly entangled facts are more likely to be recalled before unlearning, but the relationship changes—WHP weakens it while GA+KL reverses it. By directly manipulating entanglement scores and observing corresponding recall changes, they demonstrate a causal link and develop a predictive tool to audit prompts for potential leakage.

By Aakriti Shah, Yifan Hu, Thai Le
arXiv AI
4d ago

Which Attention Heads are like the Human Head? Not the Ones that Compute

The study investigates whether attention heads in large language models that align with human EEG signals are causally involved in model computation. By ablating these brain‑aligned heads during a pattern‑completion task, the authors find that while such heads contribute to performance, their removal is less disruptive than removing heads selected by attribution patching. The research also distinguishes two families of brain‑aligned heads—novelty and repetition heads—highlighting that novelty heads track human attention but are less critical than random ablation, whereas repetition heads modestly aid performance and align with abstract‑pattern representations.

By Christopher Pinier, Gustaw Opie{\l}ka, Hannes Rosenbusch, Taylor Webb, Michael D. Nunez, Claire E. Stevenson