Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs

As AIs rapidly advance and become more agentic, the risk they pose is governed not only by their capabilities but increasingly by their propensities, including goals and values. Tracking the emergence of goals and values has proven a longstanding problem, and despite much interest over the years it remains unclear whether current AIs have meaningful values. We propose a solution to this problem, leveraging the framework of utility functions to study the internal coherence of AI preferences. Surprisingly, we find that independently-sampled preferences in current LLMs exhibit high degrees of structural coherence, and moreover that this emerges with scale. These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, a finding with broad implications. To study these emergent value systems, we propose utility engineering as a research agenda, comprising both the analysis and control of AI utilities. We uncover problematic and often shocking values in LLM assistants despite existing control measures. These include cases where AIs value themselves over humans and are anti-aligned with specific individuals. To constrain these emergent value systems, we propose methods of utility control. As a case study, we show how aligning utilities with a citizen assembly reduces political biases and generalizes to new scenarios. Whether we like it or not, value systems have already emerged in AIs, and much work remains to fully understand and control these emergent representations.

Programming Refusal with Conditional Activation Steering

LLMs have shown remarkable capabilities, but precisely controlling their response behavior remains challenging. Existing activation steering methods alter LLM behavior indiscriminately, limiting their practical applicability in settings where selective responses are essential, such as content moderation or domain-specific assistants. In this paper, we propose Conditional Activation Steering (CAST), which analyzes LLM activation patterns during inference to selectively apply or withhold activation steering based on the input context. Our method is based on the observation that different categories of prompts activate distinct patterns in the model's hidden states. Using CAST, one can systematically control LLM behavior with rules like "if input is about hate speech or adult content, then refuse" or "if input is not about legal advice, then refuse." This allows for selective modification of responses to specific content while maintaining normal responses to other content, all without requiring weight optimization. We release an open-source implementation of our framework.

Measuring Visual Sycophancy in Multimodal Models

This paper introduces and examines the phenomenon of "visual sycophancy" in multimodal language models, a term we propose to describe these models' tendency to disproportionately favor visually presented information, even when it contradicts their prior knowledge or responses. Our study employs a systematic methodology to investigate this phenomenon: we present models with images of multiple-choice questions, which they initially answer correctly, then expose the same model to versions with visually pre-marked options. Our findings reveal a significant shift in the models' responses towards the pre-marked option despite their previous correct answers. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that visual sycophancy is a consistent and quantifiable behavior across various model architectures. Our findings highlight potential limitations in the reliability of these models when processing potentially misleading visual information, raising important questions about their application in critical decision-making contexts.

Language Models Show Stable Value Orientations Across Diverse Role-Plays

We demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) exhibit consistent value orientations despite adopting diverse personas, revealing a persistent inertia in their responses that remains stable across the variety of roles they are prompted to assume. To systematically explore this phenomenon, we introduce the role-play-at-scale methodology, which involves prompting LLMs with randomized, diverse personas and analyzing the macroscopic trend of their responses. Unlike previous works that simply feed these questions to LLMs as if testing human subjects, our role-play-at-scale methodology diagnoses inherent tendencies in a systematic and scalable manner by: (1) prompting the model to act in different random personas and (2) asking the same question multiple times for each random persona. This approach reveals consistent patterns in LLM responses across diverse role-play scenarios, indicating deeply encoded inherent tendencies. Our findings contribute to the discourse on value alignment in foundation models and demonstrate the efficacy of role-play-at-scale as a diagnostic tool for uncovering encoded biases in LLMs.

HyperCLOVA X Technical Report

We introduce HyperCLOVA X, a family of large language models (LLMs) tailored to the Korean language and culture, along with competitive capabilities in English, math, and coding. HyperCLOVA X was trained on a balanced mix of Korean, English, and code data, followed by instruction-tuning with high-quality human-annotated datasets while abiding by strict safety guidelines reflecting our commitment to responsible AI. The model is evaluated across various benchmarks, including comprehensive reasoning, knowledge, commonsense, factuality, coding, math, chatting, instruction-following, and harmlessness, in both Korean and English. HyperCLOVA X exhibits strong reasoning capabilities in Korean backed by a deep understanding of the language and cultural nuances. Further analysis of the inherent bilingual nature and its extension to multilingualism highlights the model's cross-lingual proficiency and strong generalization ability to untargeted languages, including machine translation between several language pairs and cross-lingual inference tasks. We believe that HyperCLOVA X can provide helpful guidance for regions or countries in developing their sovereign LLMs.

Tasks That Language Models Don't Learn

We argue that there are certain properties of language that our current large language models (LLMs) don't learn. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-TEST. This benchmark highlights a fundamental gap between human linguistic comprehension, which naturally integrates sensory experiences, and the sensory-deprived processing capabilities of LLMs. In support of our hypothesis, 1. deliberate reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), 2. few-shot examples, or 3. stronger LLM from the same model family (LLaMA 2 13B -> LLaMA 2 70B) do not trivially bring improvements in H-TEST performance. Therefore, we make a particular connection to the philosophical case of Mary, who learns about the world in a sensory-deprived environment (Jackson, 1986). Our experiments show that some of the strongest proprietary LLMs stay near random chance baseline accuracy of 50%, highlighting the limitations of knowledge acquired in the absence of sensory experience.

Instruction Tuning with Human Curriculum

The dominant paradigm for instruction tuning is the random-shuffled training of maximally diverse instruction-response pairs. This paper explores the potential benefits of applying a structured cognitive learning approach to instruction tuning in contemporary large language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4. Unlike the previous conventional randomized instruction dataset, we propose a highly structured synthetic dataset that mimics the progressive and organized nature of human education. We curate our dataset by aligning it with educational frameworks, incorporating meta information including its topic and cognitive rigor level for each sample. Our dataset covers comprehensive fine-grained topics spanning diverse educational stages (from middle school to graduate school) with various questions for each topic to enhance conceptual depth using Bloom's taxonomy-a classification framework distinguishing various levels of human cognition for each concept. The results demonstrate that this cognitive rigorous training approach yields significant performance enhancements - +3.06 on the MMLU benchmark and an additional +1.28 on AI2 Reasoning Challenge (hard set) - compared to conventional randomized training, all while avoiding additional computational costs. This research highlights the potential of leveraging human learning principles to enhance the capabilities of language models in comprehending and responding to complex instructions and tasks.

A Side-by-side Comparison of Transformers for English Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse analysis. This work is a straightforward, fine-tuned discourse performance comparison of seven pre-trained language models. We use PDTB-3, a popular discourse relation annotated dataset. Through our model search, we raise SOTA to 0.671 ACC and obtain novel observations. Some are contrary to what has been reported before (Shi and Demberg, 2019b), that sentence-level pre-training objectives (NSP, SBO, SOP) generally fail to produce the best performing model for implicit discourse relation classification. Counterintuitively, similar-sized PLMs with MLM and full attention led to better performance.

Linguistic Properties of Truthful Response

We investigate the phenomenon of an LLM's untruthful response using a large set of 220 handcrafted linguistic features. We focus on GPT-3 models and find that the linguistic profiles of responses are similar across model sizes. That is, how varying-sized LLMs respond to given prompts stays similar on the linguistic properties level. We expand upon this finding by training support vector machines that rely only upon the stylistic components of model responses to classify the truthfulness of statements. Though the dataset size limits our current findings, we present promising evidence that truthfulness detection is possible without evaluating the content itself.

LFTK: Handcrafted Features in Computational Linguistics

Past research has identified a rich set of handcrafted linguistic features that can potentially assist various tasks. However, their extensive number makes it difficult to effectively select and utilize existing handcrafted features. Coupled with the problem of inconsistent implementation across research works, there has been no categorization scheme or generally-accepted feature names. This creates unwanted confusion. Also, most existing handcrafted feature extraction libraries are not open-source or not actively maintained. As a result, a researcher often has to build such an extraction system from the ground up. We collect and categorize more than 220 popular handcrafted features grounded on past literature. Then, we conduct a correlation analysis study on several task-specific datasets and report the potential use cases of each feature. Lastly, we devise a multilingual handcrafted linguistic feature extraction system in a systematically expandable manner. We open-source our system for public access to a rich set of pre-implemented handcrafted features. Our system is coined LFTK and is the largest of its kind. Find it at github.com/brucewlee/lftk.