activity
20222025
most citedHow to DP-fy ML: A Practical Guide to Machine Learning with Differential Privacy

157 citations · 280 across the 11 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

11 papers

cs.AI2025

Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL

Monte MacDiarmid, Benjamin Wright, Jonathan Uesato +19

We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, im…

cs.CL2025★ 9 cited

Reasoning Models Don't Always Say What They Think

Yanda Chen, Joe Benton, Ansh Radhakrishnan +12

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effecti…

cs.AI2025★ 3 cited

Auditing language models for hidden objectives

Samuel Marks, Johannes Treutlein, Trenton Bricken +32

We study the feasibility of conducting alignment audits: investigations into whether models have undesired objectives. As a testbed, we train a language model with a hidden objecti…

cs.AI2024★ 24 cited

Alignment faking in large language models

Ryan Greenblatt, Carson Denison, Benjamin Wright +17

We present a demonstration of a large language model engaging in alignment faking: selectively complying with its training objective in training to prevent modification of its beha…

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.CL2024★ 2 cited

Gradient-Based Language Model Red Teaming

Nevan Wichers, Carson Denison, Ahmad Beirami

Red teaming is a common strategy for identifying weaknesses in generative language models (LMs), where adversarial prompts are produced that trigger an LM to generate unsafe respon…

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

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.AI2023★ 29 cited

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.LG2023★ 157 cited

How to DP-fy ML: A Practical Guide to Machine Learning with Differential Privacy

Natalia Ponomareva, Hussein Hazimeh, Alex Kurakin +6

ML models are ubiquitous in real world applications and are a constant focus of research. At the same time, the community has started to realize the importance of protecting the pr…

cs.LG2022

Private Ad Modeling with DP-SGD

Carson Denison, Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath +6

A well-known algorithm in privacy-preserving ML is differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD). While this algorithm has been evaluated on text and image data, it h…