papers

Publications (19)

cs.LG2023

Studying Large Language Model Generalization with Influence Functions

Roger Grosse, Juhan Bae, Cem Anil +14

When trying to gain better visibility into a machine learning model in order to understand and mitigate the associated risks, a potentially valuable source of evidence is: which tr…

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.CL2023

Question Decomposition Improves the Faithfulness of Model-Generated Reasoning

Ansh Radhakrishnan, Karina Nguyen, Anna Chen +21

As large language models (LLMs) perform more difficult tasks, it becomes harder to verify the correctness and safety of their behavior. One approach to help with this issue is to p…

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.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.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.LG2022

Scaling Laws and Interpretability of Learning from Repeated Data

Danny Hernandez, Tom Brown, Tom Conerly +15

Recent large language models have been trained on vast datasets, but also often on repeated data, either intentionally for the purpose of upweighting higher quality data, or uninte…

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…

cs.LG2021

Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code

Mark Chen, Jerry Tworek, Heewoo Jun +55

We introduce Codex, a GPT language model fine-tuned on publicly available code from GitHub, and study its Python code-writing capabilities. A distinct production version of Codex p…

cs.AI2023

Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Tamera Lanham, Anna Chen, Ansh Radhakrishnan +27

Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasonin…

cs.AI2025

Compositional Concept Generalization with Variational Quantum Circuits

Hala Hawashin, Mina Abbaszadeh, Nicholas Joseph +3

Compositional generalization is a key facet of human cognition, but lacking in current AI tools such as vision-language models. Previous work examined whether a compositional tenso…

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.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…