arXiv Machine Learning

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.

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 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