VISTA is a method that steers large language models by inferring a latent user value profile from a few survey answers and applying a hypernetwork to generate user‑specific interventions. It outperforms or matches in‑context profiling on synthetic and real datasets (Food2D, World Values Survey, PrimeX) without adding prompt tokens. VISTA also adaptively selects which survey questions to ask, stopping after only 6% of the questionnaire while preserving 94% of the full‑history benefit, and identifies a clear value axis that accurately positions unseen users.
By Yinuo Xu, Jadie Adams, Brian Hu, Shivani Kumar, David Jurgens, Arslan Basharat
The paper investigates whether fine‑tuning large language models (LLMs) on value survey responses can shift their value‑conditioned outputs and downstream behavior. Researchers first estimate baseline value profiles for several open‑source LLMs using the ten Schwartz values, then fine‑tune the models on survey‑style supervision that selectively alters target value ratings while preserving non‑target values. The resulting shifts are evaluated on held‑out survey questions and on out‑of‑domain behavioral proxies, such as a contextual moral‑judgment benchmark from Reddit AITA posts and a text‑based interactive decision‑making benchmark. The study finds that survey‑based supervision can change both survey responses and downstream behavior, but the transfer is strongly model‑ and value‑dependent and influenced by how value descriptions are framed.
By Shangrui Nie, Florian Mai, David Kacz\'er, Charles Welch, Zhixue Zhao, Lucie Flek
The paper introduces the task of predicting alignment generalization, which measures how fine‑tuning a language model to follow a specific value affects its behavior across a broad set of other values. Through a large‑scale study of 66 values, the authors show that representations derived from model activations when applying values in context outperform textual description‑based methods, achieving a correlation of 0.45 versus 0.05. They further demonstrate that these representations can predict downstream robustness and help construct a taxonomy of LLM values based on empirical generalization dynamics.
By Andy Liu, Mehar Bhatia, Karolina Stanczak, Mona Diab, Vered Shwartz, Daniel Fried
arXiv:2608. 10327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can AI systems be aligned to human values?
By Andrew Smart, Shazeda Ahmed, Jackie Kay, Jimmy Tobin, Kris Shrishak, Abeba Birhane
arXiv:2510. 26707v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As LLMs occupy an increasingly important role in society, they are more and more confronted with questions that require them not only to draw on their general knowledge but also to align with certain human value systems.
By Mehar Bhatia, Shravan Nayak, Gaurav Kamath, Marius Mosbach, Karolina Sta\'nczak, Vered Shwartz, Siva Reddy
arXiv:2510.01030v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The human ability to translate diverse perceptual and linguistic inputs into structured behavior has been thought to rest on learning robust repres...
By Zach Studdiford, Timothy T. Rogers, Kushin Mukherjee, Siddharth Suresh