Beyond Right and Wrong: Evaluating Second-order Social Reasoning in Large Language Models
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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.
arXiv:2608. 13250v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Normative datasets are often used to train and align AI systems, but the norms they contain can function as action-guiding patterns rather than neutral moral knowledge.
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:2603. 00048v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive applications including psychological support, healthcare, and high-stakes decision-making.
The article argues that current evaluations of large language models’ moral competence focus mainly on whether outputs align with human moral values—the so‑called moral value problem—while neglecting the moral norm problem, which concerns the models’ ability to identify and apply context‑sensitive moral norms. It attributes this imbalance to the field’s reliance on descriptive ethics frameworks that emphasize value representation over normative application. The authors review existing benchmarks, highlight three gaps—lack of ground‑truth norm data, insufficient evaluation of intermediate reasoning, and limited focus on context‑relevant features—and propose a research agenda to develop formal normative representations, expert‑annotated datasets, and evaluation protocols that distinguish between value‑level and norm‑level competence.
arXiv:2608. 12368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agreement with human judgments is a common proxy for evaluating the alignment of large language models (LLMs).