activity
20222025
most citedTraining a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

391 citations · 1.6k across the 16 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

16 papers

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.LG2024★ 2 cited

Sabotage Evaluations for Frontier Models

Joe Benton, Misha Wagner, Eric Christiansen +13

Sufficiently capable models could subvert human oversight and decision-making in important contexts. For example, in the context of AI development, models could covertly sabotage e…

cs.AI2024★ 9 cited

Sycophancy to Subterfuge: Investigating Reward-Tampering in Large Language Models

Carson Denison, Monte MacDiarmid, Fazl Barez +11

In reinforcement learning, specification gaming occurs when AI systems learn undesired behaviors that are highly rewarded due to misspecified training goals. Specification gaming c…

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★ 10 cited

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.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★ 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.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…