activity
20162026
most citedTraining a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

391 citations · 1.3k across the 15 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

16 papers

cs.AI2026

Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet

Adly Templeton, Tom Conerly, Jonathan Marcus +23

We demonstrate that sparse autoencoders can extract interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet, a production-scale language model, addressing the open question of whether dictiona…

cs.AI2026★ 4 cited

Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model

Nicholas Sofroniew, Isaac Kauvar, William Saunders +13

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-releva…

cs.CL2025

Jailbreak Distillation: Renewable Safety Benchmarking

Jingyu Zhang, Ahmed Elgohary, Xiawei Wang +5

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed in critical applications, raising urgent needs for robust safety benchmarking. We propose Jailbreak Distillation (JBDistill), a no…

cs.LG2025★ 2 cited

Sleepless Nights, Sugary Days: Creating Synthetic Users with Health Conditions for Realistic Coaching Agent Interactions

Taedong Yun, Eric Yang, Mustafa Safdari +13

We present an end-to-end framework for generating synthetic users for evaluating interactive agents designed to encourage positive behavior changes, such as in health and lifestyle…

cs.CL2023★ 53 cited

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.CL2022★ 52 cited

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.CL2022★ 334 cited

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.HC2022★ 35 cited

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.LG2022★ 87 cited

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.LG2022★ 48 cited

Toy Models of Superposition

Nelson Elhage, Tristan Hume, Catherine Olsson +13

Neural networks often pack many unrelated concepts into a single neuron - a puzzling phenomenon known as 'polysemanticity' which makes interpretability much more challenging. This…

cs.CL2022★ 119 cited

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.CL2022★ 170 cited

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.LG2022★ 22 cited

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.CL2022★ 391 cited

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.CL2021★ 27 cited

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.AI2016

Concrete Problems in AI Safety

Dario Amodei, Chris Olah, Jacob Steinhardt +3

Rapid progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has brought increasing attention to the potential impacts of AI technologies on society. In this paper we discus…