activity
20202026
most citedTraining a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

391 citations · 1.7k across the 19 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

20 papers

cs.LG2026

A Bird's-Eye View of Iterative Reward Design

Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty, Lauren Robson, Linda Petrini +2

Designing effective reward functions in RL typically requires substantial expertise and trial and error. Recent work automates this process with LLM-based systems that generate and…

cs.CL2026

PolyAlign: Conditional Human-Distribution Alignment

L. D. M. S. Sai Teja, Ufaq Khan, Sathira Silva +2

Post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference optimization typically align language models toward a single global assistant behavior. While effective fo…

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.CL2024

PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignment

Louis Castricato, Nathan Lile, Rafael Rafailov +2

The rapid advancement of language models (LMs) necessitates robust alignment with diverse user values. However, current preference optimization approaches often fail to capture the…

cs.CR2024★ 39 cited

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★ 8 cited

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★ 130 cited

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.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.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.NE2022★ 4 cited

Evolution through Large Models

Joel Lehman, Jonathan Gordon, Shawn Jain +3

This paper pursues the insight that large language models (LLMs) trained to generate code can vastly improve the effectiveness of mutation operators applied to programs in genetic…

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.CY2022★ 196 cited

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.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.LG2020★ 8 cited

Emergent Social Learning via Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Kamal Ndousse, Douglas Eck, Sergey Levine +1

Social learning is a key component of human and animal intelligence. By taking cues from the behavior of experts in their environment, social learners can acquire sophisticated beh…