papers

Publications (23)

cs.CL2020

Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder +28

Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains on many NLP tasks and benchmarks by pre-training on a large corpus of text followed by fine-tuning on a specific task. While typicall…

cs.HC2022

Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models

Samuel R. Bowman, Jeeyoon Hyun, Ethan Perez +43

Developing safe and useful general-purpose AI systems will require us to make progress on scalable oversight: the problem of supervising systems that potentially outperform us on m…

cs.CL2022

Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Yuntao Bai, Andy Jones, Kamal Ndousse +28

We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment tra…

cs.CV2021

Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision

Alec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Chris Hallacy +9

State-of-the-art computer vision systems are trained to predict a fixed set of predetermined object categories. This restricted form of supervision limits their generality and usab…

cs.CL2023

Evaluating and Mitigating Discrimination in Language Model Decisions

Alex Tamkin, Amanda Askell, Liane Lovitt +6

As language models (LMs) advance, interest is growing in applying them to high-stakes societal decisions, such as determining financing or housing eligibility. However, their poten…

cs.CL2022

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

Saurav Kadavath, Tom Conerly, Amanda Askell +33

We study whether language models can evaluate the validity of their own claims and predict which questions they will be able to answer correctly. We first show that larger models a…

cs.CL2019

Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models

Irene Solaiman, Miles Brundage, Jack Clark +12

Large language models have a range of beneficial uses: they can assist in prose, poetry, and programming; analyze dataset biases; and more. However, their flexibility and generativ…

cs.CY2020

Toward Trustworthy AI Development: Mechanisms for Supporting Verifiable Claims

Miles Brundage, Shahar Avin, Jasmine Wang +56

With the recent wave of progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has come a growing awareness of the large-scale impacts of AI systems, and recognition that existing regulations an…

cs.CY2019

The Role of Cooperation in Responsible AI Development

Amanda Askell, Miles Brundage, Gillian Hadfield

In this paper, we argue that competitive pressures could incentivize AI companies to underinvest in ensuring their systems are safe, secure, and have a positive social impact. Ensu…

cs.CL2025

Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models

Mrinank Sharma, Meg Tong, Tomasz Korbak +16

Human feedback is commonly utilized to finetune AI assistants. But human feedback may also encourage model responses that match user beliefs over truthful ones, a behaviour known a…

cs.CL2025

Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming

Mrinank Sharma, Meg Tong, Jesse Mu +40

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to universal jailbreaks-prompting strategies that systematically bypass model safeguards and enable users to carry out harmful processes…

cs.CL2021

A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment

Amanda Askell, Yuntao Bai, Anna Chen +19

Given the broad capabilities of large language models, it should be possible to work towards a general-purpose, text-based assistant that is aligned with human values, meaning that…

cs.CL2022

Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback

Yuntao Bai, Saurav Kadavath, Sandipan Kundu +48

As AI systems become more capable, we would like to enlist their help to supervise other AIs. We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improveme…

cs.CL2022

Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned

Deep Ganguli, Liane Lovitt, Jackson Kernion +33

We describe our early efforts to red team language models in order to simultaneously discover, measure, and attempt to reduce their potentially harmful outputs. We make three main…

cs.LG2022

In-context Learning and Induction Heads

Catherine Olsson, Nelson Elhage, Neel Nanda +23

"Induction heads" are attention heads that implement a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. In this work, we present preliminary and indirect ev…

cs.CL2022

Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback

Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang +17

Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic,…

cs.CR2024

Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training

Evan Hubinger, Carson Denison, Jesse Mu +36

Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when giv…

cs.CL2023

Specific versus General Principles for Constitutional AI

Sandipan Kundu, Yuntao Bai, Saurav Kadavath +33

Human feedback can prevent overtly harmful utterances in conversational models, but may not automatically mitigate subtle problematic behaviors such as a stated desire for self-pre…

cs.CL2023

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Aarohi Srivastava, Abhinav Rastogi, Abhishek Rao +448

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabil…

cs.CL2022

Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations

Ethan Perez, Sam Ringer, Kamilė Lukošiūtė +60

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (w…

cs.CL2023

The Capacity for Moral Self-Correction in Large Language Models

Deep Ganguli, Amanda Askell, Nicholas Schiefer +46

We test the hypothesis that language models trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have the capability to "morally self-correct" -- to avoid producing harmf…

cs.CY2022

Predictability and Surprise in Large Generative Models

Deep Ganguli, Danny Hernandez, Liane Lovitt +27

Large-scale pre-training has recently emerged as a technique for creating capable, general purpose, generative models such as GPT-3, Megatron-Turing NLG, Gopher, and many others. I…

cs.CL2024

Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models

Esin Durmus, Karina Nguyen, Thomas I. Liao +15

Large language models (LLMs) may not equitably represent diverse global perspectives on societal issues. In this paper, we develop a quantitative framework to evaluate whose opinio…