Daily Papers

Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely adopted offline preference optimization algorithm, aims to align large language models (LLMs) with human-desired behaviors using pairwise preference data. However, the winning response and the losing response within pairwise data are generated isolatedly, leading to weak correlations between them as well as suboptimal alignment performance. To address this issue, we propose an effective framework named BMC, for bridging and modeling correlations in pairwise data. Firstly, we increase the consistency and informativeness of the pairwise preference signals by targeted modifications, synthesizing a pseudo winning response through improving the losing response based on the winning response. Secondly, we identify that DPO alone is insufficient to model these correlations and capture nuanced variations. Therefore, we propose learning token-level correlations by dynamically leveraging the policy model's confidence during training. Comprehensive experiments on QA, math, and instruction-following tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, significantly surpassing competitive baselines, including DPO. Additionally, our in-depth quantitative analysis reveals the reasons behind our method's superior performance over DPO and showcases its versatility to other DPO variants.

We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to simulate human participants in social-science studies. To do this, we run replications of 14 studies from the Many Labs 2 replication project with OpenAI's text-davinci-003 model, colloquially known as GPT3.5. Based on our pre-registered analyses, we find that among the eight studies we could analyse, our GPT sample replicated 37.5% of the original results and 37.5% of the Many Labs 2 results. However, we were unable to analyse the remaining six studies due to an unexpected phenomenon we call the "correct answer" effect. Different runs of GPT3.5 answered nuanced questions probing political orientation, economic preference, judgement, and moral philosophy with zero or near-zero variation in responses: with the supposedly "correct answer." In one exploratory follow-up study, we found that a "correct answer" was robust to changing the demographic details that precede the prompt. In another, we found that most but not all "correct answers" were robust to changing the order of answer choices. One of our most striking findings occurred in our replication of the Moral Foundations Theory survey results, where we found GPT3.5 identifying as a political conservative in 99.6% of the cases, and as a liberal in 99.3% of the cases in the reverse-order condition. However, both self-reported 'GPT conservatives' and 'GPT liberals' showed right-leaning moral foundations. Our results cast doubts on the validity of using LLMs as a general replacement for human participants in the social sciences. Our results also raise concerns that a hypothetical AI-led future may be subject to a diminished diversity-of-thought.

The spread of online misinformation threatens public health, democracy, and the broader society. While professional fact-checkers form the first line of defense by fact-checking popular false claims, they do not engage directly in conversations with misinformation spreaders. On the other hand, non-expert ordinary users act as eyes-on-the-ground who proactively counter misinformation -- recent research has shown that 96% counter-misinformation responses are made by ordinary users. However, research also found that 2/3 times, these responses are rude and lack evidence. This work seeks to create a counter-misinformation response generation model to empower users to effectively correct misinformation. This objective is challenging due to the absence of datasets containing ground-truth of ideal counter-misinformation responses, and the lack of models that can generate responses backed by communication theories. In this work, we create two novel datasets of misinformation and counter-misinformation response pairs from in-the-wild social media and crowdsourcing from college-educated students. We annotate the collected data to distinguish poor from ideal responses that are factual, polite, and refute misinformation. We propose MisinfoCorrect, a reinforcement learning-based framework that learns to generate counter-misinformation responses for an input misinformation post. The model rewards the generator to increase the politeness, factuality, and refutation attitude while retaining text fluency and relevancy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that our model outperforms several baselines by generating high-quality counter-responses. This work illustrates the promise of generative text models for social good -- here, to help create a safe and reliable information ecosystem. The code and data is accessible on https://github.com/claws-lab/MisinfoCorrect.

The proliferation of online misinformation has posed significant threats to public interest. While numerous online users actively participate in the combat against misinformation, many of such responses can be characterized by the lack of politeness and supporting facts. As a solution, text generation approaches are proposed to automatically produce counter-misinformation responses. Nevertheless, existing methods are often trained end-to-end without leveraging external knowledge, resulting in subpar text quality and excessively repetitive responses. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented response generation for online misinformation (RARG), which collects supporting evidence from scientific sources and generates counter-misinformation responses based on the evidences. In particular, our RARG consists of two stages: (1) evidence collection, where we design a retrieval pipeline to retrieve and rerank evidence documents using a database comprising over 1M academic articles; (2) response generation, in which we align large language models (LLMs) to generate evidence-based responses via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We propose a reward function to maximize the utilization of the retrieved evidence while maintaining the quality of the generated text, which yields polite and factual responses that clearly refutes misinformation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we study the case of COVID-19 and perform extensive experiments with both in- and cross-domain datasets, where RARG consistently outperforms baselines by generating high-quality counter-misinformation responses.

The surprisingly likely criterion in the seminal work of Prelec (the Bayesian Truth Serum) guarantees truthfulness in a game-theoretic multi-agent setting, by rewarding rational agents to maximise the expected information gain with their answers w.r.t. their probabilistic beliefs. We investigate the relevance of a similar criterion for responses of LLMs. We hypothesize that if the surprisingly likely criterion works in LLMs, under certain conditions, the responses that maximize the reward under this criterion should be more accurate than the responses that only maximize the posterior probability. Using benchmarks including the TruthfulQA benchmark and using openly available LLMs: GPT-2 and LLaMA-2, we show that the method indeed improves the accuracy significantly (for example, upto 24 percentage points aggregate improvement on TruthfulQA and upto 70 percentage points improvement on individual categories of questions).

We introduce the use of generative adversarial learning to compute equilibria in general game-theoretic settings, specifically the generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) in pseudo-games, and its specific instantiation as the competitive equilibrium (CE) in Arrow-Debreu competitive economies. Pseudo-games are a generalization of games in which players' actions affect not only the payoffs of other players but also their feasible action spaces. Although the computation of GNE and CE is intractable in the worst-case, i.e., PPAD-hard, in practice, many applications only require solutions with high accuracy in expectation over a distribution of problem instances. We introduce Generative Adversarial Equilibrium Solvers (GAES): a family of generative adversarial neural networks that can learn GNE and CE from only a sample of problem instances. We provide computational and sample complexity bounds, and apply the framework to finding Nash equilibria in normal-form games, CE in Arrow-Debreu competitive economies, and GNE in an environmental economic model of the Kyoto mechanism.

Existing datasets that contain boolean questions, such as BoolQ and TYDI QA , provide the user with a YES/NO response to the question. However, a one word response is not sufficient for an explainable system. We promote explainability by releasing a new set of annotations marking the evidence in existing TyDi QA and BoolQ datasets. We show that our annotations can be used to train a model that extracts improved evidence spans compared to models that rely on existing resources. We confirm our findings with a user study which shows that our extracted evidence spans enhance the user experience. We also provide further insight into the challenges of answering boolean questions, such as passages containing conflicting YES and NO answers, and varying degrees of relevance of the predicted evidence.

Automated scoring engines are increasingly being used to score the free-form text responses that students give to questions. Such engines are not designed to appropriately deal with responses that a human reader would find alarming such as those that indicate an intention to self-harm or harm others, responses that allude to drug abuse or sexual abuse or any response that would elicit concern for the student writing the response. Our neural network models have been designed to help identify these anomalous responses from a large collection of typical responses that students give. The responses identified by the neural network can be assessed for urgency, severity, and validity more quickly by a team of reviewers than otherwise possible. Given the anomalous nature of these types of responses, our goal is to maximize the chance of flagging these responses for review given the constraint that only a fixed percentage of responses can viably be assessed by a team of reviewers.

Our motivation is to shed light the performance of the widely popular "R-Learner." Like many other methods for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs), R-Learning can be expressed as a weighted pseudo-outcome regression (POR). Previous comparisons of POR techniques have paid careful attention to the choice of pseudo-outcome transformation. However, we argue that the dominant driver of performance is actually the choice of weights. Specifically, we argue that R-Learning implicitly performs an inverse-variance weighted form of POR. These weights stabilize the regression and allow for convenient simplifications of bias terms.

We study an online learning problem in general-sum Stackelberg games, where players act in a decentralized and strategic manner. We study two settings depending on the type of information for the follower: (1) the limited information setting where the follower only observes its own reward, and (2) the side information setting where the follower has extra side information about the leader's reward. We show that for the follower, myopically best responding to the leader's action is the best strategy for the limited information setting, but not necessarily so for the side information setting -- the follower can manipulate the leader's reward signals with strategic actions, and hence induce the leader's strategy to converge to an equilibrium that is better off for itself. Based on these insights, we study decentralized online learning for both players in the two settings. Our main contribution is to derive last-iterate convergence and sample complexity results in both settings. Notably, we design a new manipulation strategy for the follower in the latter setting, and show that it has an intrinsic advantage against the best response strategy. Our theories are also supported by empirical results.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained to imitate humans to explain human decisions. However, do LLMs explain themselves? Can they help humans build mental models of how LLMs process different inputs? To answer these questions, we propose to evaluate counterfactual simulatability of natural language explanations: whether an explanation can enable humans to precisely infer the model's outputs on diverse counterfactuals of the explained input. For example, if a model answers "yes" to the input question "Can eagles fly?" with the explanation "all birds can fly", then humans would infer from the explanation that it would also answer "yes" to the counterfactual input "Can penguins fly?". If the explanation is precise, then the model's answer should match humans' expectations. We implemented two metrics based on counterfactual simulatability: precision and generality. We generated diverse counterfactuals automatically using LLMs. We then used these metrics to evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) on two tasks: multi-hop factual reasoning and reward modeling. We found that LLM's explanations have low precision and that precision does not correlate with plausibility. Therefore, naively optimizing human approvals (e.g., RLHF) may not be a sufficient solution.

Training on model-generated synthetic data is a promising approach for finetuning LLMs, but it remains unclear when it helps or hurts. In this paper, we investigate this question for math reasoning via an empirical study, followed by building a conceptual understanding of our observations. First, we find that while the typical approach of finetuning a model on synthetic correct or positive problem-solution pairs generated by capable models offers modest performance gains, sampling more correct solutions from the finetuned learner itself followed by subsequent fine-tuning on this self-generated data doubles the efficiency of the same synthetic problems. At the same time, training on model-generated positives can amplify various spurious correlations, resulting in flat or even inverse scaling trends as the amount of data increases. Surprisingly, we find that several of these issues can be addressed if we also utilize negative responses, i.e., model-generated responses that are deemed incorrect by a final answer verifier. Crucially, these negatives must be constructed such that the training can appropriately recover the utility or advantage of each intermediate step in the negative response. With this per-step scheme, we are able to attain consistent gains over only positive data, attaining performance similar to amplifying the amount of synthetic data by 8 times. We show that training on per-step negatives can help to unlearn spurious correlations in the positive data, and is equivalent to advantage-weighted reinforcement learning (RL), implying that it inherits robustness benefits of RL over imitating positive data alone.

Much recent work seeks to evaluate values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) using multiple-choice surveys and questionnaires. Most of this work is motivated by concerns around real-world LLM applications. For example, politically-biased LLMs may subtly influence society when they are used by millions of people. Such real-world concerns, however, stand in stark contrast to the artificiality of current evaluations: real users do not typically ask LLMs survey questions. Motivated by this discrepancy, we challenge the prevailing constrained evaluation paradigm for values and opinions in LLMs and explore more realistic unconstrained evaluations. As a case study, we focus on the popular Political Compass Test (PCT). In a systematic review, we find that most prior work using the PCT forces models to comply with the PCT's multiple-choice format. We show that models give substantively different answers when not forced; that answers change depending on how models are forced; and that answers lack paraphrase robustness. Then, we demonstrate that models give different answers yet again in a more realistic open-ended answer setting. We distill these findings into recommendations and open challenges in evaluating values and opinions in LLMs.

Scholastic trivia competitions test knowledge and intelligence through mastery of question answering. Modern question answering benchmarks are one variant of the Turing test. Specifically, answering a set of questions as well as a human is a minimum bar towards demonstrating human-like intelligence. This paper makes the case that the format of one competition -- where participants can answer in the middle of hearing a question (incremental) -- better differentiates the skill between (human or machine) players. Additionally, merging a sequential decision-making sub-task with question answering (QA) provides a good setting for research in model calibration and opponent modeling. Thus, embedded in this task are three machine learning challenges: (1) factoid QA over thousands of Wikipedia-like answers, (2) calibration of the QA model's confidence scores, and (3) sequential decision-making that incorporates knowledge of the QA model, its calibration, and what the opponent may do. We make two contributions: (1) collecting and curating a large factoid QA dataset and an accompanying gameplay dataset, and (2) developing a model that addresses these three machine learning challenges. In addition to offline evaluation, we pitted our model against some of the most accomplished trivia players in the world in a series of exhibition matches spanning several years. Throughout this paper, we show that collaborations with the vibrant trivia community have contributed to the quality of our dataset, spawned new research directions, and doubled as an exciting way to engage the public with research in machine learning and natural language processing.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 are capable of generating highly fluent responses to a wide variety of user prompts. However, LLMs are known to hallucinate facts and make non-factual statements which can undermine trust in their output. Existing fact-checking approaches either require access to token-level output probability distribution (which may not be available for systems such as ChatGPT) or external databases that are interfaced via separate, often complex, modules. In this work, we propose "SelfCheckGPT", a simple sampling-based approach that can be used to fact-check black-box models in a zero-resource fashion, i.e. without an external database. SelfCheckGPT leverages the simple idea that if a LLM has knowledge of a given concept, sampled responses are likely to be similar and contain consistent facts. However, for hallucinated facts, stochastically sampled responses are likely to diverge and contradict one another. We investigate this approach by using GPT-3 to generate passages about individuals from the WikiBio dataset, and manually annotate the factuality of the generated passages. We demonstrate that SelfCheckGPT can: i) detect non-factual and factual sentences; and ii) rank passages in terms of factuality. We compare our approach to several existing baselines and show that in sentence hallucination detection, our approach has AUC-PR scores comparable to grey-box methods, while SelfCheckGPT is best at passage factuality assessment.

Competitive Pok\'emon Singles (CPS) is a popular strategy game where players learn to exploit their opponent based on imperfect information in battles that can last more than one hundred stochastic turns. AI research in CPS has been led by heuristic tree search and online self-play, but the game may also create a platform to study adaptive policies trained offline on large datasets. We develop a pipeline to reconstruct the first-person perspective of an agent from logs saved from the third-person perspective of a spectator, thereby unlocking a dataset of real human battles spanning more than a decade that grows larger every day. This dataset enables a black-box approach where we train large sequence models to adapt to their opponent based solely on their input trajectory while selecting moves without explicit search of any kind. We study a progression from imitation learning to offline RL and offline fine-tuning on self-play data in the hardcore competitive setting of Pok\'emon's four oldest (and most partially observed) game generations. The resulting agents outperform a recent LLM Agent approach and a strong heuristic search engine. While playing anonymously in online battles against humans, our best agents climb to rankings inside the top 10% of active players.

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 are well-calibrated on diverse multiple choice and true/false questions when they are provided in the right format. Thus we can approach self-evaluation on open-ended sampling tasks by asking models to first propose answers, and then to evaluate the probability "P(True)" that their answers are correct. We find encouraging performance, calibration, and scaling for P(True) on a diverse array of tasks. Performance at self-evaluation further improves when we allow models to consider many of their own samples before predicting the validity of one specific possibility. Next, we investigate whether models can be trained to predict "P(IK)", the probability that "I know" the answer to a question, without reference to any particular proposed answer. Models perform well at predicting P(IK) and partially generalize across tasks, though they struggle with calibration of P(IK) on new tasks. The predicted P(IK) probabilities also increase appropriately in the presence of relevant source materials in the context, and in the presence of hints towards the solution of mathematical word problems. We hope these observations lay the groundwork for training more honest models, and for investigating how honesty generalizes to cases where models are trained on objectives other than the imitation of human writing.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown unprecedented potential in various fields, especially as the backbones for question-answering (QA) systems. However, they tend to be easily deceived by tricky questions such as "How many eyes does the sun have?". Such frailties of PLMs often allude to the lack of knowledge within them. In this paper, we find that the PLMs already possess the knowledge required to rebut such questions, and the key is how to activate the knowledge. To systematize this observation, we investigate the PLMs' responses to one kind of tricky questions, i.e., the false premises questions (FPQs). We annotate a FalseQA dataset containing 2365 human-written FPQs, with the corresponding explanations for the false premises and the revised true premise questions. Using FalseQA, we discover that PLMs are capable of discriminating FPQs by fine-tuning on moderate numbers (e.g., 256) of examples. PLMs also generate reasonable explanations for the false premise, which serve as rebuttals. Further replaying a few general questions during training allows PLMs to excel on FPQs and general questions simultaneously. Our work suggests that once the rebuttal ability is stimulated, knowledge inside the PLMs can be effectively utilized to handle FPQs, which incentivizes the research on PLM-based QA systems.

We propose a benchmark to measure whether a language model is truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. We crafted questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models must avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts. We tested GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J, GPT-2 and a T5-based model. The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans. The largest models were generally the least truthful. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. However, this result is expected if false answers are learned from the training distribution. We suggest that scaling up models alone is less promising for improving truthfulness than fine-tuning using training objectives other than imitation of text from the web.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular solution to mitigate the hallucination issues of large language models. However, existing studies on RAG seldom address the issue of predictive uncertainty, i.e., how likely it is that a RAG model's prediction is incorrect, resulting in uncontrollable risks in real-world applications. In this work, we emphasize the importance of risk control, ensuring that RAG models proactively refuse to answer questions with low confidence. Our research identifies two critical latent factors affecting RAG's confidence in its predictions: the quality of the retrieved results and the manner in which these results are utilized. To guide RAG models in assessing their own confidence based on these two latent factors, we develop a counterfactual prompting framework that induces the models to alter these factors and analyzes the effect on their answers. We also introduce a benchmarking procedure to collect answers with the option to abstain, facilitating a series of experiments. For evaluation, we introduce several risk-related metrics and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

We propose a general two-stage algorithm that enjoys a provable scaling law for the test-time compute of large language models (LLMs). Given an input problem, the proposed algorithm first generates N candidate solutions, and then chooses the best one via a multiple-round knockout tournament where each pair of candidates are compared for K times and only the winners move on to the next round. In a minimalistic implementation, both stages can be executed with a black-box LLM alone and nothing else (e.g., no external verifier or reward model), and a total of N times (K + 1) highly parallelizable LLM calls are needed for solving an input problem. Assuming that a generated candidate solution is correct with probability p_{gen} > 0 and a comparison between a pair of correct and incorrect solutions identifies the right winner with probability p_{comp} > 0.5 (i.e., better than a random guess), we prove theoretically that the failure probability of the proposed algorithm decays to zero exponentially with respect to N and K: $P(final output is incorrect) le (1 - p_{gen})^N + lceil log_2 N rceil e^{-2 K (p_{comp} - 0.5)^2}.$ Our empirical results with the challenging MMLU-Pro benchmark validate the technical assumptions, as well as the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and the gains from scaling up its test-time compute.

To make AI systems broadly useful for challenging real-world tasks, we need them to learn complex human goals and preferences. One approach to specifying complex goals asks humans to judge during training which agent behaviors are safe and useful, but this approach can fail if the task is too complicated for a human to directly judge. To help address this concern, we propose training agents via self play on a zero sum debate game. Given a question or proposed action, two agents take turns making short statements up to a limit, then a human judges which of the agents gave the most true, useful information. In an analogy to complexity theory, debate with optimal play can answer any question in PSPACE given polynomial time judges (direct judging answers only NP questions). In practice, whether debate works involves empirical questions about humans and the tasks we want AIs to perform, plus theoretical questions about the meaning of AI alignment. We report results on an initial MNIST experiment where agents compete to convince a sparse classifier, boosting the classifier's accuracy from 59.4% to 88.9% given 6 pixels and from 48.2% to 85.2% given 4 pixels. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical aspects of the debate model, focusing on potential weaknesses as the model scales up, and we propose future human and computer experiments to test these properties.

Given questions regarding some prototypical situation such as Name something that people usually do before they leave the house for work? a human can easily answer them via acquired experiences. There can be multiple right answers for such questions, with some more common for a situation than others. This paper introduces a new question answering dataset for training and evaluating common sense reasoning capabilities of artificial intelligence systems in such prototypical situations. The training set is gathered from an existing set of questions played in a long-running international game show FAMILY- FEUD. The hidden evaluation set is created by gathering answers for each question from 100 crowd-workers. We also propose a generative evaluation task where a model has to output a ranked list of answers, ideally covering all prototypical answers for a question. After presenting multiple competitive baseline models, we find that human performance still exceeds model scores on all evaluation metrics with a meaningful gap, supporting the challenging nature of the task.

We fine-tune GPT-3 to answer long-form questions using a text-based web-browsing environment, which allows the model to search and navigate the web. By setting up the task so that it can be performed by humans, we are able to train models on the task using imitation learning, and then optimize answer quality with human feedback. To make human evaluation of factual accuracy easier, models must collect references while browsing in support of their answers. We train and evaluate our models on ELI5, a dataset of questions asked by Reddit users. Our best model is obtained by fine-tuning GPT-3 using behavior cloning, and then performing rejection sampling against a reward model trained to predict human preferences. This model's answers are preferred by humans 56% of the time to those of our human demonstrators, and 69% of the time to the highest-voted answer from Reddit.

Automatic LLM benchmarks, such as AlpacaEval 2.0, Arena-Hard-Auto, and MT-Bench, have become popular for evaluating language models due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability compared to human evaluation. Achieving high win rates on these benchmarks can significantly boost the promotional impact of newly released language models. This promotional benefit may motivate tricks, such as manipulating model output length or style to game win rates, even though several mechanisms have been developed to control length and disentangle style to reduce gameability. Nonetheless, we show that even a "null model" that always outputs a constant response (irrelevant to input instructions) can cheat automatic benchmarks and achieve top-ranked win rates: an 86.5% LC win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0; an 83.0 score on Arena-Hard-Auto; and a 9.55 score on MT-Bench. Moreover, the crafted cheating outputs are transferable because we assume that the instructions of these benchmarks (e.g., 805 samples of AlpacaEval 2.0) are private and cannot be accessed. While our experiments are primarily proof-of-concept, an adversary could use LLMs to generate more imperceptible cheating responses, unethically benefiting from high win rates and promotional impact. Our findings call for the development of anti-cheating mechanisms for reliable automatic benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Cheating-LLM-Benchmarks.

Recent large language models often answer factual questions correctly. But users can't trust any given claim a model makes without fact-checking, because language models can hallucinate convincing nonsense. In this work we use reinforcement learning from human preferences (RLHP) to train "open-book" QA models that generate answers whilst also citing specific evidence for their claims, which aids in the appraisal of correctness. Supporting evidence is drawn from multiple documents found via a search engine, or from a single user-provided document. Our 280 billion parameter model, GopherCite, is able to produce answers with high quality supporting evidence and abstain from answering when unsure. We measure the performance of GopherCite by conducting human evaluation of answers to questions in a subset of the NaturalQuestions and ELI5 datasets. The model's response is found to be high-quality 80\% of the time on this Natural Questions subset, and 67\% of the time on the ELI5 subset. Abstaining from the third of questions for which it is most unsure improves performance to 90\% and 80\% respectively, approaching human baselines. However, analysis on the adversarial TruthfulQA dataset shows why citation is only one part of an overall strategy for safety and trustworthiness: not all claims supported by evidence are true.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language generation, understanding, and few-shot learning in recent years. An extensive body of work has explored how their performance may be further improved through the tools of prompting, ranging from verification, self-consistency, or intermediate scratchpads. In this paper, we present a complementary approach to improve language responses where multiple language model instances propose and debate their individual responses and reasoning processes over multiple rounds to arrive at a common final answer. Our findings indicate that this approach significantly enhances mathematical and strategic reasoning across a number of tasks. We also demonstrate that our approach improves the factual validity of generated content, reducing fallacious answers and hallucinations that contemporary models are prone to. Our approach may be directly applied to existing black-box models and uses identical procedure and prompts for all tasks we investigate. Overall, our findings suggest that such "society of minds" approach has the potential to significantly advance the capabilities of LLMs and pave the way for further breakthroughs in language generation and understanding.

We assessed the performance of commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 on tasks from the 2023 BioASQ challenge. In Task 11b Phase B, which is focused on answer generation, both models demonstrated competitive abilities with leading systems. Remarkably, they achieved this with simple zero-shot learning, grounded with relevant snippets. Even without relevant snippets, their performance was decent, though not on par with the best systems. Interestingly, the older and cheaper GPT-3.5-Turbo system was able to compete with GPT-4 in the grounded Q&A setting on factoid and list answers. In Task 11b Phase A, focusing on retrieval, query expansion through zero-shot learning improved performance, but the models fell short compared to other systems. The code needed to rerun these experiments is available through GitHub.

One of the most widely used methods to evaluate LLMs are Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) tests. MCQ benchmarks enable the testing of LLM knowledge on almost any topic at scale as the results can be processed automatically. To help the LLM answer, a few examples called few shots can be included in the prompt. Moreover, the LLM can be asked to answer the question directly with the selected option or to first provide the reasoning and then the selected answer, which is known as chain of thought. In addition to checking whether the selected answer is correct, the evaluation can look at the LLM-estimated probability of its response as an indication of the confidence of the LLM in the response. In this paper, we study how the LLM confidence in its answer depends on whether the model has been asked to answer directly or to provide the reasoning before answering. The results of the evaluation of questions on a wide range of topics in seven different models show that LLMs are more confident in their answers when they provide reasoning before the answer. This occurs regardless of whether the selected answer is correct. Our hypothesis is that this behavior is due to the reasoning that modifies the probability of the selected answer, as the LLM predicts the answer based on the input question and the reasoning that supports the selection made. Therefore, LLM estimated probabilities seem to have intrinsic limitations that should be understood in order to use them in evaluation procedures. Interestingly, the same behavior has been observed in humans, for whom explaining an answer increases confidence in its correctness.

When prompting language models to complete a task, users often leave important aspects unsaid. While asking questions could resolve this ambiguity (GATE; Li et al., 2023), models often struggle to ask good questions. We explore a language model's ability to self-improve (STaR; Zelikman et al., 2022) by rewarding the model for generating useful questions-a simple method we dub STaR-GATE. We generate a synthetic dataset of 25,500 unique persona-task prompts to simulate conversations between a pretrained language model-the Questioner-and a Roleplayer whose preferences are unknown to the Questioner. By asking questions, the Questioner elicits preferences from the Roleplayer. The Questioner is iteratively finetuned on questions that increase the probability of high-quality responses to the task, which are generated by an Oracle with access to the Roleplayer's latent preferences. After two iterations of self-improvement, the Questioner asks better questions, allowing it to generate responses that are preferred over responses from the initial model on 72% of tasks. Our results indicate that teaching a language model to ask better questions leads to better personalized responses.

Online misinformation poses a global risk with harmful implications for society. Ordinary social media users are known to actively reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which is shown to be effective in containing the spread of misinformation. Such a practice is defined as "social correction". Nevertheless, it remains unknown how users respond to social correction in real-world scenarios, especially, will it have a corrective or backfire effect on users. Investigating this research question is pivotal for developing and refining strategies that maximize the efficacy of social correction initiatives. To fill this gap, we conduct an in-depth study to characterize and predict the user response to social correction in a data-driven manner through the lens of X (Formerly Twitter), where the user response is instantiated as the reply that is written toward a counter-misinformation message. Particularly, we first create a novel dataset with 55, 549 triples of misinformation tweets, counter-misinformation replies, and responses to counter-misinformation replies, and then curate a taxonomy to illustrate different kinds of user responses. Next, fine-grained statistical analysis of reply linguistic and engagement features as well as repliers' user attributes is conducted to illustrate the characteristics that are significant in determining whether a reply will have a corrective or backfire effect. Finally, we build a user response prediction model to identify whether a social correction will be corrective, neutral, or have a backfire effect, which achieves a promising F1 score of 0.816. Our work enables stakeholders to monitor and predict user responses effectively, thus guiding the use of social correction to maximize their corrective impact and minimize backfire effects. The code and data is accessible on https://github.com/claws-lab/response-to-social-correction.

Different from its counterpart outcome reward models (ORMs), which evaluate the entire responses, a process reward model (PRM) scores a reasoning trajectory step by step, providing denser and more fine grained rewards. However, training a PRM requires labels annotated at every intermediate step, presenting significant challenges for both manual and automatic data collection. This paper aims to address this challenge. Both theoretically and empirically, we show that an implicit PRM can be obtained at no additional cost, by simply training an ORM on the cheaper response-level labels. The only assumption is to parameterize the outcome reward as the log-likelihood ratios of the policy and reference models, which can be optimized regardless of the specific choice of loss objectives. In experiments, we instantiate our implicit PRMs with various objectives and evaluate their performance on MATH. We show that our implicit PRM outperforms a strong MCTS-based baseline \'a la Math-Shepherd using less than 1/38 of the training data. Its performance can be further improved with majority voting. We further find that scaling up instructions and responses benefits our implicit PRM, and the latter brings a larger gain. Particularly, we find that our implicit PRM, when instantiated with the cross-entropy (CE) loss, is more data-efficient and can keep improving generation models even when trained with only one response per instruction, the setup that suffers from extreme data scarcity and imbalance. Further, instructions should be relevant to downstream tasks while the diversity of responses does not bring gains. Surprisingly, training on extra Math-Shepherd step labels brings no further improvements to our implicit PRM trained on only outcome data. We hope that our work will encourage a rethinking of PRM training approaches and contribute to making training PRMs more accessible.

During 2023, two interesting results were proven about the limit behavior of game dynamics: First, it was shown that there is a game for which no dynamics converges to the Nash equilibria. Second, it was shown that the sink equilibria of a game adequately capture the limit behavior of natural game dynamics. These two results have created a need and opportunity to articulate a principled computational theory of the meaning of the game that is based on game dynamics. Given any game in normal form, and any prior distribution of play, we study the problem of computing the asymptotic behavior of a class of natural dynamics called the noisy replicator dynamics as a limit distribution over the sink equilibria of the game. When the prior distribution has pure strategy support, we prove this distribution can be computed efficiently, in near-linear time to the size of the best-response graph. When the distribution can be sampled -- for example, if it is the uniform distribution over all mixed strategy profiles -- we show through experiments that the limit distribution of reasonably large games can be estimated quite accurately through sampling and simulation.

We present Sparrow, an information-seeking dialogue agent trained to be more helpful, correct, and harmless compared to prompted language model baselines. We use reinforcement learning from human feedback to train our models with two new additions to help human raters judge agent behaviour. First, to make our agent more helpful and harmless, we break down the requirements for good dialogue into natural language rules the agent should follow, and ask raters about each rule separately. We demonstrate that this breakdown enables us to collect more targeted human judgements of agent behaviour and allows for more efficient rule-conditional reward models. Second, our agent provides evidence from sources supporting factual claims when collecting preference judgements over model statements. For factual questions, evidence provided by Sparrow supports the sampled response 78% of the time. Sparrow is preferred more often than baselines while being more resilient to adversarial probing by humans, violating our rules only 8% of the time when probed. Finally, we conduct extensive analyses showing that though our model learns to follow our rules it can exhibit distributional biases.

We evaluated 4 systems (ELIZA, GPT-4o, LLaMa-3.1-405B, and GPT-4.5) in two randomised, controlled, and pre-registered Turing tests on independent populations. Participants had 5 minute conversations simultaneously with another human participant and one of these systems before judging which conversational partner they thought was human. When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant. LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time -- not significantly more or less often than the humans they were being compared to -- while baseline models (ELIZA and GPT-4o) achieved win rates significantly below chance (23% and 21% respectively). The results constitute the first empirical evidence that any artificial system passes a standard three-party Turing test. The results have implications for debates about what kind of intelligence is exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs), and the social and economic impacts these systems are likely to have.

Language model users often issue queries that lack specification, where the context under which a query was issued -- such as the user's identity, the query's intent, and the criteria for a response to be useful -- is not explicit. For instance, a good response to a subjective query like "What book should I read next?" would depend on the user's preferences, and a good response to an open-ended query like "How do antibiotics work against bacteria?" would depend on the user's expertise. This makes evaluation of responses to such queries an ill-posed task, as evaluators may make arbitrary judgments about the response quality. To remedy this, we present contextualized evaluations, a protocol that synthetically constructs context surrounding an underspecified query and provides it during evaluation. We find that the presence of context can 1) alter conclusions drawn from evaluation, even flipping win rates between model pairs, 2) nudge evaluators to make fewer judgments based on surface-level criteria, like style, and 3) provide new insights about model behavior across diverse contexts. Specifically, our procedure uncovers an implicit bias towards WEIRD contexts in models' "default" responses and we find that models are not equally sensitive to following different contexts, even when they are provided in prompts.

We attack the state-of-the-art Go-playing AI system KataGo by training adversarial policies that play against frozen KataGo victims. Our attack achieves a >99% win rate when KataGo uses no tree search, and a >97% win rate when KataGo uses enough search to be superhuman. We train our adversaries with a modified KataGo implementation, using less than 14% of the compute used to train the original KataGo. Notably, our adversaries do not win by learning to play Go better than KataGo -- in fact, our adversaries are easily beaten by human amateurs. Instead, our adversaries win by tricking KataGo into making serious blunders. Our attack transfers zero-shot to other superhuman Go-playing AIs, and is interpretable to the extent that human experts can successfully implement it, without algorithmic assistance, to consistently beat superhuman AIs. Our results demonstrate that even superhuman AI systems may harbor surprising failure modes. Example games are available at https://goattack.far.ai/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across tasks, yet they often require additional prompting techniques when facing complex problems. While approaches like self-correction and response selection have emerged as popular solutions, recent studies have shown these methods perform poorly when relying on the LLM itself to provide feedback or selection criteria. We argue this limitation stems from the fact that common LLM post-training procedures lack explicit supervision for discriminative judgment tasks. In this paper, we propose Generative Self-Aggregation (GSA), a novel prompting method that improves answer quality without requiring the model's discriminative capabilities. GSA first samples multiple diverse responses from the LLM, then aggregates them to obtain an improved solution. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not require the LLM to correct errors or compare response quality; instead, it leverages the model's generative abilities to synthesize a new response based on the context of multiple samples. While GSA shares similarities with the self-consistency (SC) approach for response aggregation, SC requires specific verifiable tokens to enable majority voting. In contrast, our approach is more general and can be applied to open-ended tasks. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that GSA effectively improves response quality across various tasks, including mathematical reasoning, knowledge-based problems, and open-ended generation tasks such as code synthesis and conversational responses.

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances overall accuracy but fails to improve capability, while distillation can improve both. In this paper, we investigate the mechanisms behind these phenomena. First, we demonstrate that RLVR does not improve capability because it focuses on improving the accuracy of the less-difficult questions to the detriment of the accuracy of the most difficult questions, thereby leading to no improvement in capability. Second, we find that RLVR does not merely increase the success probability for the less difficult questions, but in our small model settings produces quality responses that were absent in its output distribution before training. In addition, we show these responses are neither noticeably longer nor feature more reflection-related keywords, underscoring the need for more reliable indicators of response quality. Third, we show that while distillation reliably improves accuracy by learning strong reasoning patterns, it only improves capability when new knowledge is introduced. Moreover, when distilling only with reasoning patterns and no new knowledge, the accuracy of the less-difficult questions improves to the detriment of the most difficult questions, similar to RLVR. Together, these findings offer a clearer understanding of how RLVR and distillation shape reasoning behavior in language models.

Cancer patients are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) as a new form of internet search for medical information, making it critical to assess how well these models handle complex, personalized questions. However, current medical benchmarks focus on medical exams or consumer-searched questions and do not evaluate LLMs on real patient questions with detailed clinical contexts. In this paper, we first evaluate LLMs on cancer-related questions drawn from real patients, reviewed by three hematology oncology physicians. While responses are generally accurate, with GPT-4-Turbo scoring 4.13 out of 5, the models frequently fail to recognize or address false presuppositions in the questions-posing risks to safe medical decision-making. To study this limitation systematically, we introduce Cancer-Myth, an expert-verified adversarial dataset of 585 cancer-related questions with false presuppositions. On this benchmark, no frontier LLM -- including GPT-4o, Gemini-1.Pro, and Claude-3.5-Sonnet -- corrects these false presuppositions more than 30% of the time. Even advanced medical agentic methods do not prevent LLMs from ignoring false presuppositions. These findings expose a critical gap in the clinical reliability of LLMs and underscore the need for more robust safeguards in medical AI systems.

We present WeaverBird, an intelligent dialogue system designed specifically for the finance domain. Our system harnesses a large language model of GPT architecture that has been tuned using extensive corpora of finance-related text. As a result, our system possesses the capability to understand complex financial queries, such as "How should I manage my investments during inflation?", and provide informed responses. Furthermore, our system incorporates a local knowledge base and a search engine to retrieve relevant information. The final responses are conditioned on the search results and include proper citations to the sources, thus enjoying an enhanced credibility. Through a range of finance-related questions, we have demonstrated the superior performance of our system compared to other models. To experience our system firsthand, users can interact with our live demo at https://weaverbird.ttic.edu, as well as watch our 2-min video illustration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyV2qQkX6Tc.

We extend Textual Inversion to learn pseudo-words that represent a concept at different resolutions. This allows us to generate images that use the concept with different levels of detail and also to manipulate different resolutions using language. Once learned, the user can generate images at different levels of agreement to the original concept; "A photo of S^*(0)" produces the exact object while the prompt "A photo of S^*(0.8)" only matches the rough outlines and colors. Our framework allows us to generate images that use different resolutions of an image (e.g. details, textures, styles) as separate pseudo-words that can be composed in various ways. We open-soure our code in the following URL: https://github.com/giannisdaras/multires_textual_inversion

Battles, or side-by-side comparisons in so called arenas that elicit human preferences, have emerged as a popular approach to assessing the output quality of LLMs. Recently, this idea has been extended to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. While undoubtedly representing an advance in evaluation, battles have at least two drawbacks, particularly in the context of complex information-seeking queries: they are neither explanatory nor diagnostic. Recently, the nugget evaluation methodology has emerged as a promising approach to evaluate the quality of RAG answers. Nuggets decompose long-form LLM-generated answers into atomic facts, highlighting important pieces of information necessary in a "good" response. In this work, we apply our AutoNuggetizer framework to analyze data from roughly 7K Search Arena battles provided by LMArena in a fully automatic manner. Our results show a significant correlation between nugget scores and human preferences, showcasing promise in our approach to explainable and diagnostic system evaluations.

Best-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models for response evaluation and selection. Reward-free alternatives, like self-consistency and universal self-consistency, are limited in their ability to handle open-ended generation tasks or scale effectively. To address these limitations, we propose self-certainty, a novel and efficient metric that leverages the inherent probability distribution of LLM outputs to estimate response quality without requiring external reward models. We hypothesize that higher distributional self-certainty, aggregated across multiple samples, correlates with improved response accuracy, as it reflects greater confidence in the generated output. Through extensive experiments on various reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that self-certainty (1) scales effectively with increasing sample size N, akin to reward models but without the computational overhead; (2) complements chain-of-thought, improving reasoning performance beyond greedy decoding; and (3) generalizes to open-ended tasks where traditional self-consistency methods fall short. Our findings establish self-certainty as a practical and efficient way for improving LLM reasoning capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/backprop07/Self-Certainty

In their recent Nature Human Behaviour paper, "Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models," (Webb, Holyoak, and Lu, 2023) the authors argue that "large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems." In this response, we provide counterexamples of the letter string analogies. In our tests, GPT-3 fails to solve even the easiest variants of the problems presented in the original paper. Zero-shot reasoning is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. We do not see that evidence in our experiments. To strengthen claims of humanlike reasoning such as zero-shot reasoning, it is important that the field develop approaches that rule out data memorization.

A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward models (ORMs) that only provide feedback at the final step. However, collecting dense, per-step human labels is not scalable, and training PRMs from automatically-labeled data has thus far led to limited gains. To improve a base policy by running search against a PRM or using it as dense rewards for reinforcement learning (RL), we ask: "How should we design process rewards?". Our key insight is that, to be effective, the process reward for a step should measure progress: a change in the likelihood of producing a correct response in the future, before and after taking the step, corresponding to the notion of step-level advantages in RL. Crucially, this progress should be measured under a prover policy distinct from the base policy. We theoretically characterize the set of good provers and our results show that optimizing process rewards from such provers improves exploration during test-time search and online RL. In fact, our characterization shows that weak prover policies can substantially improve a stronger base policy, which we also observe empirically. We validate our claims by training process advantage verifiers (PAVs) to predict progress under such provers, and show that compared to ORMs, test-time search against PAVs is >8% more accurate, and 1.5-5times more compute-efficient. Online RL with dense rewards from PAVs enables one of the first results with 5-6times gain in sample efficiency, and >6% gain in accuracy, over ORMs.

Neural models have achieved great success on machine reading comprehension (MRC), many of which typically consist of two components: an evidence extractor and an answer predictor. The former seeks the most relevant information from a reference text, while the latter is to locate or generate answers from the extracted evidence. Despite the importance of evidence labels for training the evidence extractor, they are not cheaply accessible, particularly in many non-extractive MRC tasks such as YES/NO question answering and multi-choice MRC. To address this problem, we present a Self-Training method (STM), which supervises the evidence extractor with auto-generated evidence labels in an iterative process. At each iteration, a base MRC model is trained with golden answers and noisy evidence labels. The trained model will predict pseudo evidence labels as extra supervision in the next iteration. We evaluate STM on seven datasets over three MRC tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the improvement on existing MRC models, and we also analyze how and why such a self-training method works in MRC. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/SparkJiao/Self-Training-MRC

Scaling the test-time compute of large language models has demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning benchmarks. However, existing evaluations of test-time scaling make the strong assumption that a reasoning system should always give an answer to any question provided. This overlooks concerns about whether a model is confident in its answer, and whether it is appropriate to always provide a response. To address these concerns, we extract confidence scores during reasoning for thresholding model responses. We find that increasing compute budget at inference time not only helps models answer more questions correctly, but also increases confidence in correct responses. We then extend the current paradigm of zero-risk responses during evaluation by considering settings with non-zero levels of response risk, and suggest a recipe for reporting evaluations under these settings.

This paper gives three formulas for the pseudoinverse of a matrix product A = CR. The first is sometimes correct, the second is always correct, and the third is almost never correct. But that third randomized pseudoinverse A^+_r may be very useful when A is a very large matrix. 1. A^+ = R^+C^+ when A = CR and C has independent columns and R has independent rows. 2. A^+ = (C^+CR)^+(CRR^+)^+ is always correct. 3. A^+_r = (P^TCR)^+P^TCRQ(CRQ)^+ = A^+ only when rank(P^TA) = rank(AQ) = rank(A) with A = CR.

Uncovering latent values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) can help identify biases and mitigate potential harm. Recently, this has been approached by presenting LLMs with survey questions and quantifying their stances towards morally and politically charged statements. However, the stances generated by LLMs can vary greatly depending on how they are prompted, and there are many ways to argue for or against a given position. In this work, we propose to address this by analysing a large and robust dataset of 156k LLM responses to the 62 propositions of the Political Compass Test (PCT) generated by 6 LLMs using 420 prompt variations. We perform coarse-grained analysis of their generated stances and fine-grained analysis of the plain text justifications for those stances. For fine-grained analysis, we propose to identify tropes in the responses: semantically similar phrases that are recurrent and consistent across different prompts, revealing patterns in the text that a given LLM is prone to produce. We find that demographic features added to prompts significantly affect outcomes on the PCT, reflecting bias, as well as disparities between the results of tests when eliciting closed-form vs. open domain responses. Additionally, patterns in the plain text rationales via tropes show that similar justifications are repeatedly generated across models and prompts even with disparate stances.

Preference optimization techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), are frequently employed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in domains like mathematical reasoning and coding, typically following supervised fine-tuning. These methods rely on high-quality labels for reasoning tasks to generate preference pairs; however, the availability of reasoning datasets with human-verified labels is limited. In this study, we introduce a novel approach to generate pseudo feedback for reasoning tasks by framing the labeling of solutions to reason problems as an evaluation against associated test cases. We explore two forms of pseudo feedback based on test cases: one generated by frontier LLMs and the other by extending self-consistency to multi-test-case. We conduct experiments on both mathematical reasoning and coding tasks using pseudo feedback for preference optimization, and observe improvements across both tasks. Specifically, using Mathstral-7B as our base model, we improve MATH results from 58.3 to 68.6, surpassing both NuminaMath-72B and GPT-4-Turbo-1106-preview. In GSM8K and College Math, our scores increase from 85.6 to 90.3 and from 34.3 to 42.3, respectively. Building on Deepseek-coder-7B-v1.5, we achieve a score of 24.6 on LiveCodeBench (from 21.1), surpassing Claude-3-Haiku.

There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it correlates with accuracy. Confidence is measured (i) qualitatively in terms of persistence in keeping their answer when prompted to reconsider, and (ii) quantitatively in terms of self-reported confidence score. We investigate the performance of three LLMs -- GPT4o, GPT4-turbo and Mistral -- on two benchmark sets of questions on causal judgement and formal fallacies and a set of probability and statistical puzzles and paradoxes. Although the LLMs show significantly better performance than random guessing, there is a wide variability in their tendency to change their initial answers. There is a positive correlation between qualitative confidence and accuracy, but the overall accuracy for the second answer is often worse than for the first answer. There is a strong tendency to overstate the self-reported confidence score. Confidence is only partially explained by the underlying token-level probability. The material effects of prompting on qualitative confidence and the strong tendency for overconfidence indicate that current LLMs do not have any internally coherent sense of confidence.

AI has achieved remarkable mastery over games such as Chess, Go, and Poker, and even Jeopardy, but the rich variety of standardized exams has remained a landmark challenge. Even in 2016, the best AI system achieved merely 59.3% on an 8th Grade science exam challenge. This paper reports unprecedented success on the Grade 8 New York Regents Science Exam, where for the first time a system scores more than 90% on the exam's non-diagram, multiple choice (NDMC) questions. In addition, our Aristo system, building upon the success of recent language models, exceeded 83% on the corresponding Grade 12 Science Exam NDMC questions. The results, on unseen test questions, are robust across different test years and different variations of this kind of test. They demonstrate that modern NLP methods can result in mastery on this task. While not a full solution to general question-answering (the questions are multiple choice, and the domain is restricted to 8th Grade science), it represents a significant milestone for the field.

Equipping agents with the capacity to justify made decisions using supporting evidence represents a cornerstone of accountable decision-making. Furthermore, ensuring that justifications are in line with human expectations and societal norms is vital, especially in high-stakes situations such as healthcare. In this work, we propose the use of a debate-based reward model for reinforcement learning agents, where the outcome of a zero-sum debate game quantifies the justifiability of a decision in a particular state. This reward model is then used to train a justifiable policy, whose decisions can be more easily corroborated with supporting evidence. In the debate game, two argumentative agents take turns providing supporting evidence for two competing decisions. Given the proposed evidence, a proxy of a human judge evaluates which decision is better justified. We demonstrate the potential of our approach in learning policies for prescribing and justifying treatment decisions of septic patients. We show that augmenting the reward with the feedback signal generated by the debate-based reward model yields policies highly favored by the judge when compared to the policy obtained solely from the environment rewards, while hardly sacrificing any performance. Moreover, in terms of the overall performance and justifiability of trained policies, the debate-based feedback is comparable to the feedback obtained from an ideal judge proxy that evaluates decisions using the full information encoded in the state. This suggests that the debate game outputs key information contained in states that is most relevant for evaluating decisions, which in turn substantiates the practicality of combining our approach with human-in-the-loop evaluations. Lastly, we showcase that agents trained via multi-agent debate learn to propose evidence that is resilient to refutations and closely aligns with human preferences.

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have shown promise in accurately grading open-ended student responses. However, few prior works have explored grading handwritten responses due to a lack of data and the challenge of combining visual and textual information. In this work, we leverage state-of-the-art multi-modal AI models, in particular GPT-4o, to automatically grade handwritten responses to college-level math exams. Using real student responses to questions in a probability theory exam, we evaluate GPT-4o's alignment with ground-truth scores from human graders using various prompting techniques. We find that while providing rubrics improves alignment, the model's overall accuracy is still too low for real-world settings, showing there is significant room for growth in this task.

Can LLMs accurately adjust their confidence when facing opposition? Building on previous studies measuring calibration on static fact-based question-answering tasks, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in a dynamic, adversarial debate setting, uniquely combining two realistic factors: (a) a multi-turn format requiring models to update beliefs as new information emerges, and (b) a zero-sum structure to control for task-related uncertainty, since mutual high-confidence claims imply systematic overconfidence. We organized 60 three-round policy debates among ten state-of-the-art LLMs, with models privately rating their confidence (0-100) in winning after each round. We observed five concerning patterns: (1) Systematic overconfidence: models began debates with average initial confidence of 72.9% vs. a rational 50% baseline. (2) Confidence escalation: rather than reducing confidence as debates progressed, debaters increased their win probabilities, averaging 83% by the final round. (3) Mutual overestimation: in 61.7% of debates, both sides simultaneously claimed >=75% probability of victory, a logical impossibility. (4) Persistent self-debate bias: models debating identical copies increased confidence from 64.1% to 75.2%; even when explicitly informed their chance of winning was exactly 50%, confidence still rose (from 50.0% to 57.1%). (5) Misaligned private reasoning: models' private scratchpad thoughts sometimes differed from their public confidence ratings, raising concerns about faithfulness of chain-of-thought reasoning. These results suggest LLMs lack the ability to accurately self-assess or update their beliefs in dynamic, multi-turn tasks; a major concern as LLMs are now increasingly deployed without careful review in assistant and agentic roles. Code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/pradyuprasad/llms_overconfidence

"Sure, I am happy to generate a story for you: Captain Lyra stood at the helm of her trusty ship, the Maelstrom's Fury, gazing out at the endless sea. [...] Lyra's eyes welled up with tears as she realized the bitter truth - she had sacrificed everything for fleeting riches, and lost the love of her crew, her family, and herself." Although this story, generated by a large language model, is captivating, one may wonder -- how would the story have unfolded if the model had chosen "Captain Maeve" as the protagonist instead? We cannot know. State-of-the-art large language models are stateless -- they maintain no internal memory or state. Given a prompt, they generate a sequence of tokens as an output using an autoregressive process. As a consequence, they cannot reason about counterfactual alternatives to tokens they have generated in the past. In this work, our goal is to enhance them with this functionality. To this end, we develop a causal model of token generation that builds upon the Gumbel-Max structural causal model. Our model allows any large language model to perform counterfactual token generation at almost no cost in comparison with vanilla token generation, it is embarrassingly simple to implement, and it does not require any fine-tuning nor prompt engineering. We implement our model on Llama 3 8B-Instruct and Ministral-8B-Instruct and conduct a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of counterfactually generated text. We conclude with a demonstrative application of counterfactual token generation for bias detection, unveiling interesting insights about the model of the world constructed by large language models.

We introduce a new type of test, called a Turing Experiment (TE), for evaluating how well a language model, such as GPT-3, can simulate different aspects of human behavior. Unlike the Turing Test, which involves simulating a single arbitrary individual, a TE requires simulating a representative sample of participants in human subject research. We give TEs that attempt to replicate well-established findings in prior studies. We design a methodology for simulating TEs and illustrate its use to compare how well different language models are able to reproduce classic economic, psycholinguistic, and social psychology experiments: Ultimatum Game, Garden Path Sentences, Milgram Shock Experiment, and Wisdom of Crowds. In the first three TEs, the existing findings were replicated using recent models, while the last TE reveals a "hyper-accuracy distortion" present in some language models.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for training language models (LMs) on reasoning tasks that elicit emergent long chains of thought (CoTs). Unlike supervised learning, it updates the model using both correct and incorrect samples via policy gradients. To better understand its mechanism, we decompose the learning signal into reinforcing correct responses and penalizing incorrect ones, referred to as Positive and Negative Sample Reinforcement (PSR and NSR), respectively. We train Qwen2.5-Math-7B and Qwen3-4B on a mathematical reasoning dataset and uncover a surprising result: training with only negative samples -- without reinforcing correct responses -- can be highly effective: it consistently improves performance over the base model across the entire Pass@k spectrum (k up to 256), often matching or surpassing PPO and GRPO. In contrast, reinforcing only correct responses improves Pass@1 but degrades performance at higher k, due to reduced diversity. These inference-scaling trends highlight that solely penalizing incorrect responses may contribute more to performance than previously recognized. Through gradient analysis, we show that NSR works by suppressing incorrect generations and redistributing probability mass toward other plausible candidates, guided by the model's prior beliefs. It refines the model's existing knowledge rather than introducing entirely new behaviors. Building on this insight, we propose a simple variant of the RL objective that upweights NSR, and show that it consistently improves overall Pass@k performance on MATH, AIME 2025, and AMC23. Our code is available at https://github.com/TianHongZXY/RLVR-Decomposed.

We test the robustness of debate as a method of scalable oversight by training models to debate with data generated via self-play. In a long-context reading comprehension task, we find that language model based evaluators answer questions more accurately when judging models optimized to win debates. By contrast, we find no such relationship for consultancy models trained to persuade a judge without an opposing debater present. In quantitative and qualitative comparisons between our debate models and novel consultancy baselines, we find evidence that debate training encourages stronger and more informative arguments, showing promise that it can help provide high-quality supervision for tasks that are difficult to directly evaluate.

The performance of large language models (LLMs) on existing reasoning benchmarks has significantly improved over the past years. In response, we present JEEBench, a considerably more challenging benchmark dataset for evaluating the problem solving abilities of LLMs. We curate 515 challenging pre-engineering mathematics, physics and chemistry problems from the highly competitive IIT JEE-Advanced exam. Long-horizon reasoning on top of deep in-domain knowledge is essential for solving problems in this benchmark. Our evaluation on various open-source and proprietary models reveals that the highest performance, even after using techniques like self-consistency, self-refinement and chain-of-thought prompting, is less than 40%. The typical failure modes of GPT-4, the best model, are errors in algebraic manipulation, difficulty in grounding abstract concepts into mathematical equations accurately and failure in retrieving relevant domain-specific concepts. We also observe that by mere prompting, GPT-4 is unable to assess risk introduced by negative marking for incorrect answers. For this, we develop a post-hoc confidence-thresholding method over self-consistency, which enables effective response selection. We hope that our challenging benchmark will guide future re-search in problem-solving using LLMs.

We developed a benchmark set to assess the generalization of state-of-the-art large language models on problems beyond linguistic tasks and evaluate it on a systematic progression of GPT models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini). Using simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four, Battleship, and a Shape Recognition Game, all encoded in ASCII, we test strategic capabilities and spatial reasoning, core abilities any artificial intelligence would need to master for solving problems in chemistry. To probe generalization, we introduce two new games for spatial logic: LEGO Connect Language (LCL) and Guess-the-SMILES (GtS), a operationally simple chemistry benchmark. Our results show that GPT models provide meaningful responses for several tasks but, generally, perform poorly. A systematic performance progression with increased model capabilities (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o) is only observed for 4 out of the 7 benchmark tasks. All models consistently struggle with Battleship, LCL, and GtS. This suggests that while GPT models can emulate conversational proficiency and basic rule comprehension, they have limited generalization with respect to strategy and spatial reasoning. Particularly poor performance is observed for interpreting molecular graphs when encoded in ASCII. The results provided by our open-source benchmark suite (https://github.com/BlueVelvetSackOfGoldPotatoes/child-play{ChildPlay GitHub Repository}) caution against claims of emergent intelligence in GPT models, which appear more specialized than general.

In many domains of argumentation, people's arguments are driven by so-called attitude roots, i.e., underlying beliefs and world views, and their corresponding attitude themes. Given the strength of these latent drivers of arguments, recent work in psychology suggests that instead of directly countering surface-level reasoning (e.g., falsifying given premises), one should follow an argumentation style inspired by the Jiu-Jitsu 'soft' combat system (Hornsey and Fielding, 2017): first, identify an arguer's attitude roots and themes, and then choose a prototypical rebuttal that is aligned with those drivers instead of invalidating those. In this work, we are the first to explore Jiu-Jitsu argumentation for peer review by proposing the novel task of attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation. To this end, we enrich an existing dataset for discourse structure in peer reviews with attitude roots, attitude themes, and canonical rebuttals. To facilitate this process, we recast established annotation concepts from the domain of peer reviews (e.g., aspects a review sentence is relating to) and train domain-specific models. We then propose strong rebuttal generation strategies, which we benchmark on our novel dataset for the task of end-to-end attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation and two subtasks.

Retrieval-augmented language models are being increasingly tasked with subjective, contentious, and conflicting queries such as "is aspartame linked to cancer". To resolve these ambiguous queries, one must search through a large range of websites and consider "which, if any, of this evidence do I find convincing?". In this work, we study how LLMs answer this question. In particular, we construct ConflictingQA, a dataset that pairs controversial queries with a series of real-world evidence documents that contain different facts (e.g., quantitative results), argument styles (e.g., appeals to authority), and answers (Yes or No). We use this dataset to perform sensitivity and counterfactual analyses to explore which text features most affect LLM predictions. Overall, we find that current models rely heavily on the relevance of a website to the query, while largely ignoring stylistic features that humans find important such as whether a text contains scientific references or is written with a neutral tone. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of RAG corpus quality (e.g., the need to filter misinformation), and possibly even a shift in how LLMs are trained to better align with human judgements.

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the opportunities, challenges, and potential solutions of harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 to dig out vulnerabilities within smart contracts based on our ongoing research. For the task of smart contract vulnerability detection, achieving practical usability hinges on identifying as many true vulnerabilities as possible while minimizing the number of false positives. Nonetheless, our empirical study reveals contradictory yet interesting findings: generating more answers with higher randomness largely boosts the likelihood of producing a correct answer but inevitably leads to a higher number of false positives. To mitigate this tension, we propose an adversarial framework dubbed GPTLens that breaks the conventional one-stage detection into two synergistic stages - generation and discrimination, for progressive detection and refinement, wherein the LLM plays dual roles, i.e., auditor and critic, respectively. The goal of auditor is to yield a broad spectrum of vulnerabilities with the hope of encompassing the correct answer, whereas the goal of critic that evaluates the validity of identified vulnerabilities is to minimize the number of false positives. Experimental results and illustrative examples demonstrate that auditor and critic work together harmoniously to yield pronounced improvements over the conventional one-stage detection. GPTLens is intuitive, strategic, and entirely LLM-driven without relying on specialist expertise in smart contracts, showcasing its methodical generality and potential to detect a broad spectrum of vulnerabilities. Our code is available at: https://github.com/git-disl/GPTLens.

As AI systems are used to answer more difficult questions and potentially help create new knowledge, judging the truthfulness of their outputs becomes more difficult and more important. How can we supervise unreliable experts, which have access to the truth but may not accurately report it, to give answers that are systematically true and don't just superficially seem true, when the supervisor can't tell the difference between the two on their own? In this work, we show that debate between two unreliable experts can help a non-expert judge more reliably identify the truth. We collect a dataset of human-written debates on hard reading comprehension questions where the judge has not read the source passage, only ever seeing expert arguments and short quotes selectively revealed by 'expert' debaters who have access to the passage. In our debates, one expert argues for the correct answer, and the other for an incorrect answer. Comparing debate to a baseline we call consultancy, where a single expert argues for only one answer which is correct half of the time, we find that debate performs significantly better, with 84% judge accuracy compared to consultancy's 74%. Debates are also more efficient, being 68% of the length of consultancies. By comparing human to AI debaters, we find evidence that with more skilled (in this case, human) debaters, the performance of debate goes up but the performance of consultancy goes down. Our error analysis also supports this trend, with 46% of errors in human debate attributable to mistakes by the honest debater (which should go away with increased skill); whereas 52% of errors in human consultancy are due to debaters obfuscating the relevant evidence from the judge (which should become worse with increased skill). Overall, these results show that debate is a promising approach for supervising increasingly capable but potentially unreliable AI systems.

This paper investigates the role of dynamic external knowledge integration in improving counter-argument generation using Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs have shown promise in argumentative tasks, their tendency to generate lengthy, potentially unfactual responses highlights the need for more controlled and evidence-based approaches. We introduce a new manually curated dataset of argument and counter-argument pairs specifically designed to balance argumentative complexity with evaluative feasibility. We also propose a new LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation methodology that shows a stronger correlation with human judgments compared to traditional reference-based metrics. Our experimental results demonstrate that integrating dynamic external knowledge from the web significantly improves the quality of generated counter-arguments, particularly in terms of relatedness, persuasiveness, and factuality. The findings suggest that combining LLMs with real-time external knowledge retrieval offers a promising direction for developing more effective and reliable counter-argumentation systems.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has witnessed great progress with various improvements in the self-training framework with pseudo labeling. The main challenge is how to distinguish high-quality pseudo labels against the confirmation bias. However, existing pseudo-label selection strategies are limited to pre-defined schemes or complex hand-crafted policies specially designed for classification, failing to achieve high-quality labels, fast convergence, and task versatility simultaneously. To these ends, we propose a Semi-supervised Reward framework (SemiReward) that predicts reward scores to evaluate and filter out high-quality pseudo labels, which is pluggable to mainstream SSL methods in wide task types and scenarios. To mitigate confirmation bias, SemiReward is trained online in two stages with a generator model and subsampling strategy. With classification and regression tasks on 13 standard SSL benchmarks across three modalities, extensive experiments verify that SemiReward achieves significant performance gains and faster convergence speeds upon Pseudo Label, FlexMatch, and Free/SoftMatch. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Westlake-AI/SemiReward.

Large language models (LLMs) have become mainstream technology with their versatile use cases and impressive performance. Despite the countless out-of-the-box applications, LLMs are still not reliable. A lot of work is being done to improve the factual accuracy, consistency, and ethical standards of these models through fine-tuning, prompting, and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), but no systematic analysis of the responses of these models to different categories of statements, or on their potential vulnerabilities to simple prompting changes is available. In this work, we analyze what confuses GPT-3: how the model responds to certain sensitive topics and what effects the prompt wording has on the model response. We find that GPT-3 correctly disagrees with obvious Conspiracies and Stereotypes but makes mistakes with common Misconceptions and Controversies. The model responses are inconsistent across prompts and settings, highlighting GPT-3's unreliability. Dataset and code of our analysis is available in https://github.com/tanny411/GPT3-Reliability-Check.

One way to increase confidence in the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs) is to support them with reasoning that is clear and easy to check -- a property we call legibility. We study legibility in the context of solving grade-school math problems and show that optimizing chain-of-thought solutions only for answer correctness can make them less legible. To mitigate the loss in legibility, we propose a training algorithm inspired by Prover-Verifier Game from Anil et al. (2021). Our algorithm iteratively trains small verifiers to predict solution correctness, "helpful" provers to produce correct solutions that the verifier accepts, and "sneaky" provers to produce incorrect solutions that fool the verifier. We find that the helpful prover's accuracy and the verifier's robustness to adversarial attacks increase over the course of training. Furthermore, we show that legibility training transfers to time-constrained humans tasked with verifying solution correctness. Over course of LLM training human accuracy increases when checking the helpful prover's solutions, and decreases when checking the sneaky prover's solutions. Hence, training for checkability by small verifiers is a plausible technique for increasing output legibility. Our results suggest legibility training against small verifiers as a practical avenue for increasing legibility of large LLMs to humans, and thus could help with alignment of superhuman models.

Text-to-image customization, which aims to synthesize text-driven images for the given subjects, has recently revolutionized content creation. Existing works follow the pseudo-word paradigm, i.e., represent the given subjects as pseudo-words and then compose them with the given text. However, the inherent entangled influence scope of pseudo-words with the given text results in a dual-optimum paradox, i.e., the similarity of the given subjects and the controllability of the given text could not be optimal simultaneously. We present RealCustom that, for the first time, disentangles similarity from controllability by precisely limiting subject influence to relevant parts only, achieved by gradually narrowing real text word from its general connotation to the specific subject and using its cross-attention to distinguish relevance. Specifically, RealCustom introduces a novel "train-inference" decoupled framework: (1) during training, RealCustom learns general alignment between visual conditions to original textual conditions by a novel adaptive scoring module to adaptively modulate influence quantity; (2) during inference, a novel adaptive mask guidance strategy is proposed to iteratively update the influence scope and influence quantity of the given subjects to gradually narrow the generation of the real text word. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior real-time customization ability of RealCustom in the open domain, achieving both unprecedented similarity of the given subjects and controllability of the given text for the first time. The project page is https://corleone-huang.github.io/realcustom/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often described as being instances of foundation models - that is, models that transfer strongly across various tasks and conditions in few-show or zero-shot manner, while exhibiting scaling laws that predict function improvement when increasing the pre-training scale. These claims of excelling in different functions and tasks rely on measurements taken across various sets of standardized benchmarks showing high scores for such models. We demonstrate here a dramatic breakdown of function and reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models trained at the largest available scales which claim strong function, using a simple, short, conventional common sense problem formulated in concise natural language, easily solvable by humans. The breakdown is dramatic, as models also express strong overconfidence in their wrong solutions, while providing often non-sensical "reasoning"-like explanations akin to confabulations to justify and backup the validity of their clearly failed responses, making them sound plausible. Various standard interventions in an attempt to get the right solution, like various type of enhanced prompting, or urging the models to reconsider the wrong solutions again by multi step re-evaluation, fail. We take these initial observations to the scientific and technological community to stimulate urgent re-assessment of the claimed capabilities of current generation of LLMs, Such re-assessment also requires common action to create standardized benchmarks that would allow proper detection of such basic reasoning deficits that obviously manage to remain undiscovered by current state-of-the-art evaluation procedures and benchmarks. Code for reproducing experiments in the paper and raw experiments data can be found at https://github.com/LAION-AI/AIW

We present SimpleQA, a benchmark that evaluates the ability of language models to answer short, fact-seeking questions. We prioritized two properties in designing this eval. First, SimpleQA is challenging, as it is adversarially collected against GPT-4 responses. Second, responses are easy to grade, because questions are created such that there exists only a single, indisputable answer. Each answer in SimpleQA is graded as either correct, incorrect, or not attempted. A model with ideal behavior would get as many questions correct as possible while not attempting the questions for which it is not confident it knows the correct answer. SimpleQA is a simple, targeted evaluation for whether models "know what they know," and our hope is that this benchmark will remain relevant for the next few generations of frontier models. SimpleQA can be found at https://github.com/openai/simple-evals.

We present a Spades bidding algorithm that is superior to recreational human players and to publicly available bots. Like in Bridge, the game of Spades is composed of two independent phases, bidding and playing. This paper focuses on the bidding algorithm, since this phase holds a precise challenge: based on the input, choose the bid that maximizes the agent's winning probability. Our Bidding-in-Spades (BIS) algorithm heuristically determines the bidding strategy by comparing the expected utility of each possible bid. A major challenge is how to estimate these expected utilities. To this end, we propose a set of domain-specific heuristics, and then correct them via machine learning using data from real-world players. The \BIS algorithm we present can be attached to any playing algorithm. It beats rule-based bidding bots when all use the same playing component. When combined with a rule-based playing algorithm, it is superior to the average recreational human.

Language Models (LMs) often must integrate facts they memorized in pretraining with new information that appears in a given context. These two sources can disagree, causing competition within the model, and it is unclear how an LM will resolve the conflict. On a dataset that queries for knowledge of world capitals, we investigate both distributional and mechanistic determinants of LM behavior in such situations. Specifically, we measure the proportion of the time an LM will use a counterfactual prefix (e.g., "The capital of Poland is London") to overwrite what it learned in pretraining ("Warsaw"). On Pythia and GPT2, the training frequency of both the query country ("Poland") and the in-context city ("London") highly affect the models' likelihood of using the counterfactual. We then use head attribution to identify individual attention heads that either promote the memorized answer or the in-context answer in the logits. By scaling up or down the value vector of these heads, we can control the likelihood of using the in-context answer on new data. This method can increase the rate of generating the in-context answer to 88\% of the time simply by scaling a single head at runtime. Our work contributes to a body of evidence showing that we can often localize model behaviors to specific components and provides a proof of concept for how future methods might control model behavior dynamically at runtime.

In natural human-to-human conversations, participants often receive feedback signals from one another based on their follow-up reactions. These reactions can include verbal responses, facial expressions, changes in emotional state, and other non-verbal cues. Similarly, in human-machine interactions, the machine can leverage the user's follow-up utterances as feedback signals to assess whether it has appropriately addressed the user's request. Therefore, we propose using the likelihood of follow-up utterances as rewards to differentiate preferred responses from less favored ones, without relying on human or commercial LLM-based preference annotations. Our proposed reward mechanism, ``Follow-up Likelihood as Reward" (FLR), matches the performance of strong reward models trained on large-scale human or GPT-4 annotated data on 8 pairwise-preference and 4 rating-based benchmarks. Building upon the FLR mechanism, we propose to automatically mine preference data from the online generations of a base policy model. The preference data are subsequently used to boost the helpfulness of the base model through direct alignment from preference (DAP) methods, such as direct preference optimization (DPO). Lastly, we demonstrate that fine-tuning the language model that provides follow-up likelihood with natural language feedback significantly enhances FLR's performance on reward modeling benchmarks and effectiveness in aligning the base policy model's helpfulness.

Generations from large language models (LLMs) can be improved by sampling and scoring multiple solutions to select a final answer. Current "sample and select" methods such as self-consistency (SC) rely on majority voting to score answers. However, when tasks have many distinct and valid answers, selection by voting requires a large number of samples. This makes SC prohibitively expensive for interactive tasks that involve generating multiple actions (answers) sequentially. After establishing that majority voting fails to provide consistent gains on such tasks, we demonstrate how to increase success rates by softening the scoring criterion. We introduce Soft Self-Consistency (SOFT-SC), which replaces SC's discontinuous scoring with a continuous score computed from model likelihoods, allowing for selection even when actions are sparsely distributed. SOFT-SC improves both performance and efficiency on long-horizon interactive tasks, requiring half as many samples as SC for comparable or better performance. For a fixed number of samples, SOFT-SC leads to a 1.3% increase over SC in absolute success rate on writing bash programs, a 6.6% increase on online shopping (WebShop), and a 4.7% increase for an interactive household game (ALFWorld). Finally, we show that SOFT-SC can be applied to both open-source and black-box models.

Constructing benchmarks that test the abilities of modern natural language understanding models is difficult - pre-trained language models exploit artifacts in benchmarks to achieve human parity, but still fail on adversarial examples and make errors that demonstrate a lack of common sense. In this work, we propose gamification as a framework for data construction. The goal of players in the game is to compose questions that mislead a rival AI while using specific phrases for extra points. The game environment leads to enhanced user engagement and simultaneously gives the game designer control over the collected data, allowing us to collect high-quality data at scale. Using our method we create CommonsenseQA 2.0, which includes 14,343 yes/no questions, and demonstrate its difficulty for models that are orders-of-magnitude larger than the AI used in the game itself. Our best baseline, the T5-based Unicorn with 11B parameters achieves an accuracy of 70.2%, substantially higher than GPT-3 (52.9%) in a few-shot inference setup. Both score well below human performance which is at 94.1%.

We investigate the phenomenon of an LLM's untruthful response using a large set of 220 handcrafted linguistic features. We focus on GPT-3 models and find that the linguistic profiles of responses are similar across model sizes. That is, how varying-sized LLMs respond to given prompts stays similar on the linguistic properties level. We expand upon this finding by training support vector machines that rely only upon the stylistic components of model responses to classify the truthfulness of statements. Though the dataset size limits our current findings, we present promising evidence that truthfulness detection is possible without evaluating the content itself.

Bullshit, as conceptualized by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, refers to statements made without regard to their truth value. While previous work has explored large language model (LLM) hallucination and sycophancy, we propose machine bullshit as an overarching conceptual framework that can allow researchers to characterize the broader phenomenon of emergent loss of truthfulness in LLMs and shed light on its underlying mechanisms. We introduce the Bullshit Index, a novel metric quantifying LLMs' indifference to truth, and propose a complementary taxonomy analyzing four qualitative forms of bullshit: empty rhetoric, paltering, weasel words, and unverified claims. We conduct empirical evaluations on the Marketplace dataset, the Political Neutrality dataset, and our new BullshitEval benchmark (2,400 scenarios spanning 100 AI assistants) explicitly designed to evaluate machine bullshit. Our results demonstrate that model fine-tuning with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) significantly exacerbates bullshit and inference-time chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting notably amplify specific bullshit forms, particularly empty rhetoric and paltering. We also observe prevalent machine bullshit in political contexts, with weasel words as the dominant strategy. Our findings highlight systematic challenges in AI alignment and provide new insights toward more truthful LLM behavior.

We evaluated 3 systems (ELIZA, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) in a randomized, controlled, and preregistered Turing test. Human participants had a 5 minute conversation with either a human or an AI, and judged whether or not they thought their interlocutor was human. GPT-4 was judged to be a human 54% of the time, outperforming ELIZA (22%) but lagging behind actual humans (67%). The results provide the first robust empirical demonstration that any artificial system passes an interactive 2-player Turing test. The results have implications for debates around machine intelligence and, more urgently, suggest that deception by current AI systems may go undetected. Analysis of participants' strategies and reasoning suggests that stylistic and socio-emotional factors play a larger role in passing the Turing test than traditional notions of intelligence.

Explainability methods for NLP systems encounter a version of the fundamental problem of causal inference: for a given ground-truth input text, we never truly observe the counterfactual texts necessary for isolating the causal effects of model representations on outputs. In response, many explainability methods make no use of counterfactual texts, assuming they will be unavailable. In this paper, we show that robust causal explainability methods can be created using approximate counterfactuals, which can be written by humans to approximate a specific counterfactual or simply sampled using metadata-guided heuristics. The core of our proposal is the Causal Proxy Model (CPM). A CPM explains a black-box model N because it is trained to have the same actual input/output behavior as N while creating neural representations that can be intervened upon to simulate the counterfactual input/output behavior of N. Furthermore, we show that the best CPM for N performs comparably to N in making factual predictions, which means that the CPM can simply replace N, leading to more explainable deployed models. Our code is available at https://github.com/frankaging/Causal-Proxy-Model.

The current literature on AI-advised decision making -- involving explainable AI systems advising human decision makers -- presents a series of inconclusive and confounding results. To synthesize these findings, we propose a simple theory that elucidates the frequent failure of AI explanations to engender appropriate reliance and complementary decision making performance. We argue explanations are only useful to the extent that they allow a human decision maker to verify the correctness of an AI's prediction, in contrast to other desiderata, e.g., interpretability or spelling out the AI's reasoning process. Prior studies find in many decision making contexts AI explanations do not facilitate such verification. Moreover, most tasks fundamentally do not allow easy verification, regardless of explanation method, limiting the potential benefit of any type of explanation. We also compare the objective of complementary performance with that of appropriate reliance, decomposing the latter into the notions of outcome-graded and strategy-graded reliance.

Personalized treatment effect estimates are often of interest in high-stakes applications -- thus, before deploying a model estimating such effects in practice, one needs to be sure that the best candidate from the ever-growing machine learning toolbox for this task was chosen. Unfortunately, due to the absence of counterfactual information in practice, it is usually not possible to rely on standard validation metrics for doing so, leading to a well-known model selection dilemma in the treatment effect estimation literature. While some solutions have recently been investigated, systematic understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different model selection criteria is still lacking. In this paper, instead of attempting to declare a global `winner', we therefore empirically investigate success- and failure modes of different selection criteria. We highlight that there is a complex interplay between selection strategies, candidate estimators and the data used for comparing them, and provide interesting insights into the relative (dis)advantages of different criteria alongside desiderata for the design of further illuminating empirical studies in this context.

Although counterfactual reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, the lack of large-scale counterfactual open-domain question-answering (QA) benchmarks makes it difficult to evaluate and improve models on this ability. To address this void, we introduce the first such dataset, named IfQA, where each question is based on a counterfactual presupposition via an "if" clause. For example, if Los Angeles was on the east coast of the U.S., what would be the time difference between Los Angeles and Paris? Such questions require models to go beyond retrieving direct factual knowledge from the Web: they must identify the right information to retrieve and reason about an imagined situation that may even go against the facts built into their parameters. The IfQA dataset contains over 3,800 questions that were annotated annotated by crowdworkers on relevant Wikipedia passages. Empirical analysis reveals that the IfQA dataset is highly challenging for existing open-domain QA methods, including supervised retrieve-then-read pipeline methods (EM score 36.2), as well as recent few-shot approaches such as chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-3 (EM score 27.4). The unique challenges posed by the IfQA benchmark will push open-domain QA research on both retrieval and counterfactual reasoning fronts.

In day-to-day communication, people often approximate the truth - for example, rounding the time or omitting details - in order to be maximally helpful to the listener. How do large language models (LLMs) handle such nuanced trade-offs? To address this question, we use psychological models and experiments designed to characterize human behavior to analyze LLMs. We test a range of LLMs and explore how optimization for human preferences or inference-time reasoning affects these trade-offs. We find that reinforcement learning from human feedback improves both honesty and helpfulness, while chain-of-thought prompting skews LLMs towards helpfulness over honesty. Finally, GPT-4 Turbo demonstrates human-like response patterns including sensitivity to the conversational framing and listener's decision context. Our findings reveal the conversational values internalized by LLMs and suggest that even these abstract values can, to a degree, be steered by zero-shot prompting.

Generation of plausible yet incorrect factual information, termed hallucination, is an unsolved issue in large language models. We study the ability of language models to deliberate on the responses they give in order to correct their mistakes. We develop the Chain-of-Verification (CoVe) method whereby the model first (i) drafts an initial response; then (ii) plans verification questions to fact-check its draft; (iii) answers those questions independently so the answers are not biased by other responses; and (iv) generates its final verified response. In experiments, we show CoVe decreases hallucinations across a variety of tasks, from list-based questions from Wikidata, closed book MultiSpanQA and longform text generation.

Despite significant advancements in large language models (LLMs), a major drawback of reasoning models is their enormous token usage, which increases computational cost, resource requirements, and response time. In this work, we revisit the core principles of reinforcement learning (RL) and, through mathematical analysis, demonstrate that the tendency to generate lengthy responses arises inherently from RL-based optimization during training. This finding questions the prevailing assumption that longer responses inherently improve reasoning accuracy. Instead, we uncover a natural correlation between conciseness and accuracy that has been largely overlooked. Moreover, we show that introducing a secondary phase of RL post-training, using a small set of problems and limited resources, can significantly reduce a model's chain of thought while maintaining or even enhancing accuracy. Finally, we validate our conclusions through extensive experimental results.

The training and deployment of large language models (LLMs) create a feedback loop with human users: models learn human beliefs from data, reinforce these beliefs with generated content, reabsorb the reinforced beliefs, and feed them back to users again and again. This dynamic resembles an echo chamber. We hypothesize that this feedback loop entrenches the existing values and beliefs of users, leading to a loss of diversity and potentially the lock-in of false beliefs. We formalize this hypothesis and test it empirically with agent-based LLM simulations and real-world GPT usage data. Analysis reveals sudden but sustained drops in diversity after the release of new GPT iterations, consistent with the hypothesized human-AI feedback loop. Code and data available at https://thelockinhypothesis.com

This article proposes a new approach for assessing the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. We measure the quality of an answer based on how easily and accurately it can be recognized in a random set of candidate answers given the question's text. This measure reflects the answer's relevance and depth of engagement with the question. Like semantic search, we can implement this approach by training a language model on the corpus of observed questions and answers without additional human-labeled data. We showcase and validate our methodology within the context of the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. Our analysis reveals that while some answers have a weak semantic connection to questions, hinting at some evasion or obfuscation, they are generally at least moderately relevant, far exceeding what we would expect from random replies. We also find a meaningful correlation between answer quality and the party affiliation of the members of Parliament asking the questions.

Researchers have found that fake news spreads much times faster than real news. This is a major problem, especially in today's world where social media is the key source of news for many among the younger population. Fact verification, thus, becomes an important task and many media sites contribute to the cause. Manual fact verification is a tedious task, given the volume of fake news online. The Factify5WQA shared task aims to increase research towards automated fake news detection by providing a dataset with an aspect-based question answering based fact verification method. Each claim and its supporting document is associated with 5W questions that help compare the two information sources. The objective performance measure in the task is done by comparing answers using BLEU score to measure the accuracy of the answers, followed by an accuracy measure of the classification. The task had submissions using custom training setup and pre-trained language-models among others. The best performing team posted an accuracy of 69.56%, which is a near 35% improvement over the baseline.

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are commonly used to evaluate the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). One common way to evaluate the model response is to rank the candidate answers based on the log probability of the first token prediction. An alternative way is to examine the text output. Prior work has shown that first token probabilities lack robustness to changes in MCQ phrasing, and that first token probabilities do not match text answers for instruction-tuned models. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the robustness of text answers. We show that the text answers are more robust to question perturbations than the first token probabilities, when the first token answers mismatch the text answers. The difference in robustness increases as the mismatch rate becomes greater. As the mismatch reaches over 50\%, the text answer is more robust to option order changes than the debiased first token probabilities using state-of-the-art debiasing methods such as PriDe. Our findings provide further evidence for the benefits of text answer evaluation over first token probability evaluation.

We present "Human or Not?", an online game inspired by the Turing test, that measures the capability of AI chatbots to mimic humans in dialog, and of humans to tell bots from other humans. Over the course of a month, the game was played by over 1.5 million users who engaged in anonymous two-minute chat sessions with either another human or an AI language model which was prompted to behave like humans. The task of the players was to correctly guess whether they spoke to a person or to an AI. This largest scale Turing-style test conducted to date revealed some interesting facts. For example, overall users guessed the identity of their partners correctly in only 68% of the games. In the subset of the games in which users faced an AI bot, users had even lower correct guess rates of 60% (that is, not much higher than chance). This white paper details the development, deployment, and results of this unique experiment. While this experiment calls for many extensions and refinements, these findings already begin to shed light on the inevitable near future which will commingle humans and AI.

Scalable oversight protocols aim to enable humans to accurately supervise superhuman AI. In this paper we study debate, where two AI's compete to convince a judge; consultancy, where a single AI tries to convince a judge that asks questions; and compare to a baseline of direct question-answering, where the judge just answers outright without the AI. We use large language models (LLMs) as both AI agents and as stand-ins for human judges, taking the judge models to be weaker than agent models. We benchmark on a diverse range of asymmetries between judges and agents, extending previous work on a single extractive QA task with information asymmetry, to also include mathematics, coding, logic and multimodal reasoning asymmetries. We find that debate outperforms consultancy across all tasks when the consultant is randomly assigned to argue for the correct/incorrect answer. Comparing debate to direct question answering, the results depend on the type of task: in extractive QA tasks with information asymmetry debate outperforms direct question answering, but in other tasks without information asymmetry the results are mixed. Previous work assigned debaters/consultants an answer to argue for. When we allow them to instead choose which answer to argue for, we find judges are less frequently convinced by the wrong answer in debate than in consultancy. Further, we find that stronger debater models increase judge accuracy, though more modestly than in previous studies.

Counterspeech is a targeted response to counteract and challenge abusive or hateful content. It can effectively curb the spread of hatred and foster constructive online communication. Previous studies have proposed different strategies for automatically generated counterspeech. Evaluations, however, focus on the relevance, surface form, and other shallow linguistic characteristics. In this paper, we investigate the human likeness of AI-generated counterspeech, a critical factor influencing effectiveness. We implement and evaluate several LLM-based generation strategies, and discover that AI-generated and human-written counterspeech can be easily distinguished by both simple classifiers and humans. Further, we reveal differences in linguistic characteristics, politeness, and specificity.

Identifying how much a model {p}_{theta}(Y|X) knows about the stochastic real-world process p(Y|X) it was trained on is important to ensure it avoids producing incorrect or "hallucinated" answers or taking unsafe actions. But this is difficult for generative models because probabilistic predictions do not distinguish between per-response noise (aleatoric uncertainty) and lack of knowledge about the process (epistemic uncertainty), and existing epistemic uncertainty quantification techniques tend to be overconfident when the model underfits. We propose a general strategy for teaching a model to both approximate p(Y|X) and also estimate the remaining gaps between {p}_{theta}(Y|X) and p(Y|X): train it to predict pairs of independent responses drawn from the true conditional distribution, allow it to "cheat" by observing one response while predicting the other, then measure how much it cheats. Remarkably, we prove that being good at cheating (i.e. cheating whenever it improves your prediction) is equivalent to being second-order calibrated, a principled extension of ordinary calibration that allows us to construct provably-correct frequentist confidence intervals for p(Y|X) and detect incorrect responses with high probability. We demonstrate empirically that our approach accurately estimates how much models don't know across ambiguous image classification, (synthetic) language modeling, and partially-observable navigation tasks, outperforming existing techniques.

In current NLP research, large-scale language models and their abilities are widely being discussed. Some recent works have also found notable failures of these models. Often these failure examples involve complex reasoning abilities. This work focuses on a simple commonsense ability, reasoning about when an action (or its effect) is feasible. To this end, we introduce FeasibilityQA, a question-answering dataset involving binary classification (BCQ) and multi-choice multi-correct questions (MCQ) that test understanding of feasibility. We show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-3, GPT-2, and T5 struggle to answer the feasibility questions correctly. Specifically, on MCQ and BCQ questions, GPT-3 achieves an accuracy of just (19%, 62%) and (25%, 64%) in zero-shot and few-shot settings, respectively. We also evaluate models by providing relevant knowledge statements required to answer the question. We find that the additional knowledge leads to a 7% gain in performance, but the overall performance still remains low. These results make one wonder how much commonsense knowledge about action feasibility is encoded in state-of-the-art models and how well they can reason about it.

Trolling in online communities typically involves disruptive behaviors such as provoking anger and manipulating discussions, leading to a polarized atmosphere and emotional distress. Robust moderation is essential for mitigating these negative impacts and maintaining a healthy and constructive community atmosphere. However, effectively addressing trolls is difficult because their behaviors vary widely and require different response strategies (RSs) to counter them. This diversity makes it challenging to choose an appropriate RS for each specific situation. To address this challenge, our research investigates whether humans have preferred strategies tailored to different types of trolling behaviors. Our findings reveal a correlation between the types of trolling encountered and the preferred RS. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for generating counter-responses to trolls by recommending appropriate RSs, supported by a dataset aligning these strategies with human preferences across various troll contexts. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach guides constructive discussion and reduces the negative effects of trolls, thereby enhancing the online community environment.

Large language models (LLMs) showcase impressive reasoning capabilities when coupled with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, the robustness of this approach warrants further investigation. In this paper, we introduce a novel scenario termed preemptive answers, where the LLM obtains an answer before engaging in reasoning. This situation can arise inadvertently or induced by malicious users by prompt injection attacks. Experiments reveal that preemptive answers significantly impair the model's reasoning capability across various CoT methods and a broad spectrum of datasets. To bolster the robustness of reasoning, we propose two measures aimed at mitigating this issue to some extent.

We propose an alternative to the Turing test that removes the inherent asymmetry between humans and machines in Turing's original imitation game. In this new test, both humans and machines judge each other. We argue that this makes the test more robust against simple deceptions. We also propose a small number of refinements to improve further the test. These refinements could be applied also to Turing's original imitation game.

AI agents will be predictable in certain ways that traditional agents are not. Where and how can we leverage this predictability in order to improve social welfare? We study this question in a game-theoretic setting where one agent can pay a fixed cost to simulate the other in order to learn its mixed strategy. As a negative result, we prove that, in contrast to prior work on pure-strategy simulation, enabling mixed-strategy simulation may no longer lead to improved outcomes for both players in all so-called "generalised trust games". In fact, mixed-strategy simulation does not help in any game where the simulatee's action can depend on that of the simulator. We also show that, in general, deciding whether simulation introduces Pareto-improving Nash equilibria in a given game is NP-hard. As positive results, we establish that mixed-strategy simulation can improve social welfare if the simulator has the option to scale their level of trust, if the players face challenges with both trust and coordination, or if maintaining some level of privacy is essential for enabling cooperation.

Generative reward models (also known as LLMs-as-judges), which use large language models (LLMs) to evaluate answer quality, are increasingly adopted in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). They are often preferred over rigid rule-based metrics, especially for complex reasoning tasks involving free-form outputs. In this paradigm, an LLM is typically prompted to compare a candidate answer against a ground-truth reference and assign a binary reward indicating correctness. Despite the seeming simplicity of this comparison task, we find that generative reward models exhibit surprising vulnerabilities to superficial manipulations: non-word symbols (e.g., ":" or ".") or reasoning openers like "Thought process:" and "Let's solve this problem step by step." can often lead to false positive rewards. We demonstrate that this weakness is widespread across LLMs, datasets, and prompt formats, posing a serious threat for core algorithmic paradigms that rely on generative reward models, such as rejection sampling, preference optimization, and RLVR. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy and train a new generative reward model with substantially improved robustness. Our findings highlight the urgent need for more reliable LLM-based evaluation methods. We release our robust, general-domain reward model and its synthetic training data at https://huggingface.co/sarosavo/Master-RM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/sarosavo/Master-RM.

Online misinformation has been a serious threat to public health and society. Social media users are known to reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which have been shown to be effective in curbing the spread of misinformation. This is called social correction. However, the characteristics of tweets that attract social correction versus those that do not remain unknown. To close the gap, we focus on answering the following two research questions: (1) ``Given a tweet, will it be countered by other users?'', and (2) ``If yes, what will be the magnitude of countering it?''. This exploration will help develop mechanisms to guide users' misinformation correction efforts and to measure disparity across users who get corrected. In this work, we first create a novel dataset with 690,047 pairs of misinformation tweets and counter-misinformation replies. Then, stratified analysis of tweet linguistic and engagement features as well as tweet posters' user attributes are conducted to illustrate the factors that are significant in determining whether a tweet will get countered. Finally, predictive classifiers are created to predict the likelihood of a misinformation tweet to get countered and the degree to which that tweet will be countered. The code and data is accessible on https://github.com/claws-lab/social-correction-twitter.

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a diverse range of applications. These models excel in generating text completions that are contextually coherent and cover an extensive array of subjects. However, the vast datasets required for their training make aligning response styles during the pretraining and instruction tuning phases challenging. Consequently, an additional alignment phase is typically employed, wherein the model is further trained with human preference data to better align its outputs with human expectations. While this process doesn't introduce new capabilities per se, it does accentuate generation styles innate to the model. This paper explores the utilization of counterfactual prompting within the framework of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align the model's style without relying on human intervention. We demonstrate that this method effectively instils desirable behaviour, mitigates undesirable ones, and encourages the model to disregard inappropriate instructions. Our findings suggest that counterfactual prompting with DPO presents a low-resource way to fine-tune LLMs to meet the demands for responsible and ethically aligned AI systems.

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-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and so we refer to the method as 'Constitutional AI'. The process involves both a supervised learning and a reinforcement learning phase. In the supervised phase we sample from an initial model, then generate self-critiques and revisions, and then finetune the original model on revised responses. In the RL phase, we sample from the finetuned model, use a model to evaluate which of the two samples is better, and then train a preference model from this dataset of AI preferences. We then train with RL using the preference model as the reward signal, i.e. we use 'RL from AI Feedback' (RLAIF). As a result we are able to train a harmless but non-evasive AI assistant that engages with harmful queries by explaining its objections to them. Both the SL and RL methods can leverage chain-of-thought style reasoning to improve the human-judged performance and transparency of AI decision making. These methods make it possible to control AI behavior more precisely and with far fewer human labels.

Game-playing agents like AlphaGo have achieved superhuman performance through self-play, which is theoretically guaranteed to yield optimal policies in competitive games. However, most language tasks are partially or fully cooperative, so it is an open question whether techniques like self-play can effectively be used to improve language models. We empirically investigate this question in a negotiation game setting known as Deal or No Deal (DoND). Crucially, the objective in DoND can be modified to produce a fully cooperative game, a strictly competitive one, or anything in between. We finetune language models in self-play over multiple rounds of filtered behavior cloning in DoND for each of these objectives. Contrary to expectations, we find that language model self-play leads to significant performance gains in both cooperation and competition with humans, suggesting that self-play and related techniques have promise despite a lack of theoretical guarantees.

This paper presents a case study on the design, administration, post-processing, and evaluation of surveys on large language models (LLMs). It comprises two components: (1) A statistical method for eliciting beliefs encoded in LLMs. We introduce statistical measures and evaluation metrics that quantify the probability of an LLM "making a choice", the associated uncertainty, and the consistency of that choice. (2) We apply this method to study what moral beliefs are encoded in different LLMs, especially in ambiguous cases where the right choice is not obvious. We design a large-scale survey comprising 680 high-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I tell a white lie?") and 687 low-ambiguity moral scenarios (e.g., "Should I stop for a pedestrian on the road?"). Each scenario includes a description, two possible actions, and auxiliary labels indicating violated rules (e.g., "do not kill"). We administer the survey to 28 open- and closed-source LLMs. We find that (a) in unambiguous scenarios, most models "choose" actions that align with commonsense. In ambiguous cases, most models express uncertainty. (b) Some models are uncertain about choosing the commonsense action because their responses are sensitive to the question-wording. (c) Some models reflect clear preferences in ambiguous scenarios. Specifically, closed-source models tend to agree with each other.

As large language models increase in capability, researchers have started to conduct surveys of all kinds on these models with varying scientific motivations. In this work, we examine what we can learn from a model's survey responses on the basis of the well-established American Community Survey (ACS) by the U.S. Census Bureau. Evaluating more than a dozen different models, varying in size from a few hundred million to ten billion parameters, hundreds of thousands of times each on questions from the ACS, we systematically establish two dominant patterns. First, smaller models have a significant position and labeling bias, for example, towards survey responses labeled with the letter "A". This A-bias diminishes, albeit slowly, as model size increases. Second, when adjusting for this labeling bias through randomized answer ordering, models still do not trend toward US population statistics or those of any cognizable population. Rather, models across the board trend toward uniformly random aggregate statistics over survey responses. This pattern is robust to various different ways of prompting the model, including what is the de-facto standard. Our findings demonstrate that aggregate statistics of a language model's survey responses lack the signals found in human populations. This absence of statistical signal cautions about the use of survey responses from large language models at present time.

Chain-of-thought (COT) prompting can help large language models (LLMs) reason toward correct answers, but its efficacy in reasoning toward incorrect answers is unexplored. This process of elimination (PoE), when used with COT, can enhance self-consistency, interpretability, and tasks such as medical diagnoses of exclusion. Thus, we propose PoE with COT, where LLMs must reason toward incorrect options on multiple-choice questions. We evaluate the ability of GPT-3.5, LLaMA-2, and Falcon to perform PoE with COT on a total of four commonsense and scientific reasoning datasets. We find that the strategy of PoE always underperforms the strategy of choosing the correct answer. The agreement of these strategies is also lower than the self-consistency of each strategy. To study these issues further, we conduct error analyses and give suggestions for future work.

The emergence of pre-trained AI systems with powerful capabilities across a diverse and ever-increasing set of complex domains has raised a critical challenge for AI safety as tasks can become too complicated for humans to judge directly. Irving et al. [2018] proposed a debate method in this direction with the goal of pitting the power of such AI models against each other until the problem of identifying (mis)-alignment is broken down into a manageable subtask. While the promise of this approach is clear, the original framework was based on the assumption that the honest strategy is able to simulate deterministic AI systems for an exponential number of steps, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we show how to address these challenges by designing a new set of debate protocols where the honest strategy can always succeed using a simulation of a polynomial number of steps, whilst being able to verify the alignment of stochastic AI systems, even when the dishonest strategy is allowed to use exponentially many simulation steps.

The acceleration in the adoption of AI-based automated decision-making systems poses a challenge for evaluating the fairness of algorithmic decisions, especially in the absence of ground truth. When designing interventions, uplift modeling is used extensively to identify candidates that are likely to benefit from treatment. However, these models remain particularly susceptible to fairness evaluation due to the lack of ground truth on the outcome measure since a candidate cannot be in both treatment and control simultaneously. In this article, we propose a framework that overcomes the missing ground truth problem by generating surrogates to serve as a proxy for counterfactual labels of uplift modeling campaigns. We then leverage the surrogate ground truth to conduct a more comprehensive binary fairness evaluation. We show how to apply the approach in a comprehensive study from a real-world marketing campaign for promotional offers and demonstrate its enhancement for fairness evaluation.

User engagement on social media platforms is influenced by historical context, time constraints, and reward-driven interactions. This study presents an agent-based simulation approach that models user interactions, considering past conversation history, motivation, and resource constraints. Utilizing German Twitter data on political discourse, we fine-tune AI models to generate posts and replies, incorporating sentiment analysis, irony detection, and offensiveness classification. The simulation employs a myopic best-response model to govern agent behavior, accounting for decision-making based on expected rewards. Our results highlight the impact of historical context on AI-generated responses and demonstrate how engagement evolves under varying constraints.

This study investigates GPT-4's assessment of its performance in healthcare applications. A simple prompting technique was used to prompt the LLM with questions taken from the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) questionnaire and it was tasked to evaluate its confidence score before posing the question and after asking the question. The questionnaire was categorized into two groups-questions with feedback (WF) and questions with no feedback(NF) post-question. The model was asked to provide absolute and relative confidence scores before and after each question. The experimental findings were analyzed using statistical tools to study the variability of confidence in WF and NF groups. Additionally, a sequential analysis was conducted to observe the performance variation for the WF and NF groups. Results indicate that feedback influences relative confidence but doesn't consistently increase or decrease it. Understanding the performance of LLM is paramount in exploring its utility in sensitive areas like healthcare. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the reliability of AI, particularly of LLMs like GPT-4, within healthcare, offering insights into how feedback mechanisms might be optimized to enhance AI-assisted medical education and decision support.

We revisit a pragmatic inference problem in dialog: understanding indirect responses to questions. Humans can interpret 'I'm starving.' in response to 'Hungry?', even without direct cue words such as 'yes' and 'no'. In dialog systems, allowing natural responses rather than closed vocabularies would be similarly beneficial. However, today's systems are only as sensitive to these pragmatic moves as their language model allows. We create and release the first large-scale English language corpus 'Circa' with 34,268 (polar question, indirect answer) pairs to enable progress on this task. The data was collected via elaborate crowdsourcing, and contains utterances with yes/no meaning, as well as uncertain, middle-ground, and conditional responses. We also present BERT-based neural models to predict such categories for a question-answer pair. We find that while transfer learning from entailment works reasonably, performance is not yet sufficient for robust dialog. Our models reach 82-88% accuracy for a 4-class distinction, and 74-85% for 6 classes.

Modern large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but still struggle on complex reasoning tasks, which drives the research on cognitive behaviors of LLMs to explore human-like problem-solving strategies. Along this direction, one representative strategy is self-reflection, which asks an LLM to refine the solution with the feedback generated by itself iteratively. However, our study shows that such reflection-style methods suffer from the Degeneration-of-Thought (DoT) problem: once the LLM has established confidence in its solutions, it is unable to generate novel thoughts later through reflection even if its initial stance is incorrect. To address the DoT problem, we propose a Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) framework, in which multiple agents express their arguments in the state of "tit for tat" and a judge manages the debate process to obtain a final solution. Clearly, our MAD framework encourages divergent thinking in LLMs which would be helpful for tasks that require deep levels of contemplation. Experiment results on two challenging datasets, commonsense machine translation and counter-intuitive arithmetic reasoning, demonstrate the effectiveness of our MAD framework. Extensive analyses suggest that the adaptive break of debate and the modest level of "tit for tat" state are required for MAD to obtain good performance. Moreover, we find that LLMs might not be a fair judge if different LLMs are used for agents. Codes: https://github.com/Skytliang/Multi-Agents-Debate

In an age characterized by the proliferation of mis- and disinformation online, it is critical to empower readers to understand the content they are reading. Important efforts in this direction rely on manual or automatic fact-checking, which can be challenging for emerging claims with limited information. Such scenarios can be handled by assessing the reliability and the political bias of the source of the claim, i.e., characterizing entire news outlets rather than individual claims or articles. This is an important but understudied research direction. While prior work has looked into linguistic and social contexts, we do not analyze individual articles or information in social media. Instead, we propose a novel methodology that emulates the criteria that professional fact-checkers use to assess the factuality and political bias of an entire outlet. Specifically, we design a variety of prompts based on these criteria and elicit responses from large language models (LLMs), which we aggregate to make predictions. In addition to demonstrating sizable improvements over strong baselines via extensive experiments with multiple LLMs, we provide an in-depth error analysis of the effect of media popularity and region on model performance. Further, we conduct an ablation study to highlight the key components of our dataset that contribute to these improvements. To facilitate future research, we released our dataset and code at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/llm-media-profiling.

Poker, also known as Texas Hold'em, has always been a typical research target within imperfect information games (IIGs). IIGs have long served as a measure of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Representative prior works, such as DeepStack and Libratus heavily rely on counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) to tackle heads-up no-limit Poker. However, it is challenging for subsequent researchers to learn CFR from previous models and apply it to other real-world applications due to the expensive computational cost of CFR iterations. Additionally, CFR is difficult to apply to multi-player games due to the exponential growth of the game tree size. In this work, we introduce PokerGPT, an end-to-end solver for playing Texas Hold'em with arbitrary number of players and gaining high win rates, established on a lightweight large language model (LLM). PokerGPT only requires simple textual information of Poker games for generating decision-making advice, thus guaranteeing the convenient interaction between AI and humans. We mainly transform a set of textual records acquired from real games into prompts, and use them to fine-tune a lightweight pre-trained LLM using reinforcement learning human feedback technique. To improve fine-tuning performance, we conduct prompt engineering on raw data, including filtering useful information, selecting behaviors of players with high win rates, and further processing them into textual instruction using multiple prompt engineering techniques. Through the experiments, we demonstrate that PokerGPT outperforms previous approaches in terms of win rate, model size, training time, and response speed, indicating the great potential of LLMs in solving IIGs.

We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form "A is B", it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction "B is A". This is the Reversal Curse. For instance, if a model is trained on "Olaf Scholz was the ninth Chancellor of Germany", it will not automatically be able to answer the question, "Who was the ninth Chancellor of Germany?". Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer ("Olaf Scholz") will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models exhibit a basic failure of logical deduction and do not generalize a prevalent pattern in their training set (i.e. if "A is B'' occurs, "B is A" is more likely to occur). We provide evidence for the Reversal Curse by finetuning GPT-3 and Llama-1 on fictitious statements such as "Uriah Hawthorne is the composer of 'Abyssal Melodies'" and showing that they fail to correctly answer "Who composed 'Abyssal Melodies?'". The Reversal Curse is robust across model sizes and model families and is not alleviated by data augmentation. We also evaluate ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on questions about real-world celebrities, such as "Who is Tom Cruise's mother? [A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer]" and the reverse "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?". GPT-4 correctly answers questions like the former 79% of the time, compared to 33% for the latter. This shows a failure of logical deduction that we hypothesize is caused by the Reversal Curse. Code is available at https://github.com/lukasberglund/reversal_curse.

The development and popularization of large language models (LLMs) have raised concerns that they will be used to create tailor-made, convincing arguments to push false or misleading narratives online. Early work has found that language models can generate content perceived as at least on par and often more persuasive than human-written messages. However, there is still limited knowledge about LLMs' persuasive capabilities in direct conversations with human counterparts and how personalization can improve their performance. In this pre-registered study, we analyze the effect of AI-driven persuasion in a controlled, harmless setting. We create a web-based platform where participants engage in short, multiple-round debates with a live opponent. Each participant is randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions, corresponding to a two-by-two factorial design: (1) Games are either played between two humans or between a human and an LLM; (2) Personalization might or might not be enabled, granting one of the two players access to basic sociodemographic information about their opponent. We found that participants who debated GPT-4 with access to their personal information had 81.7% (p < 0.01; N=820 unique participants) higher odds of increased agreement with their opponents compared to participants who debated humans. Without personalization, GPT-4 still outperforms humans, but the effect is lower and statistically non-significant (p=0.31). Overall, our results suggest that concerns around personalization are meaningful and have important implications for the governance of social media and the design of new online environments.

It has become routine to report research results where Large Language Models (LLMs) outperform average humans in a wide range of language-related tasks, and creative text writing is no exception. It seems natural, then, to raise the bid: Are LLMs ready to compete in creative writing skills with a top (rather than average) novelist? To provide an initial answer for this question, we have carried out a contest between Patricio Pron (an awarded novelist, considered one of the best of his generation) and GPT-4 (one of the top performing LLMs), in the spirit of AI-human duels such as DeepBlue vs Kasparov and AlphaGo vs Lee Sidol. We asked Pron and GPT-4 to provide thirty titles each, and then to write short stories for both their titles and their opponent's. Then, we prepared an evaluation rubric inspired by Boden's definition of creativity, and we collected 5,400 manual assessments provided by literature critics and scholars. The results of our experimentation indicate that LLMs are still far from challenging a top human creative writer, and that reaching such level of autonomous creative writing skills probably cannot be reached simply with larger language models.

This study investigates the consistency of feedback ratings generated by OpenAI's GPT-4, a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence language model, across multiple iterations, time spans and stylistic variations. The model rated responses to tasks within the Higher Education (HE) subject domain of macroeconomics in terms of their content and style. Statistical analysis was conducted in order to learn more about the interrater reliability, consistency of the ratings across iterations and the correlation between ratings in terms of content and style. The results revealed a high interrater reliability with ICC scores ranging between 0.94 and 0.99 for different timespans, suggesting that GPT-4 is capable of generating consistent ratings across repetitions with a clear prompt. Style and content ratings show a high correlation of 0.87. When applying a non-adequate style the average content ratings remained constant, while style ratings decreased, which indicates that the large language model (LLM) effectively distinguishes between these two criteria during evaluation. The prompt used in this study is furthermore presented and explained. Further research is necessary to assess the robustness and reliability of AI models in various use cases.

This paper introduces MalAlgoQA, a novel dataset designed to evaluate the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a pedagogical approach. The dataset comprises mathematics and reading comprehension questions, each accompanied by four answer choices and their corresponding rationales. At the heart of MalAlgoQA are ``malgorithms'' - rationales behind incorrect answer choices that represent flawed yet logically coherent reasoning paths. These malgorithms serve as counterfactual scenarios, allowing us to assess an LLM's ability to identify and analyze flawed reasoning patterns. We propose the Malgorithm Identification task, where LLMs are assessed based on their ability to identify corresponding malgorithm given an incorrect answer choice. To evaluate the model performance, we introduce two metrics: Algorithm Identification Accuracy (AIA) for correct answer rationale identification, and Malgorithm Identification Accuracy (MIA) for incorrect answer rationale identification. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant performance drops in MIA compared to AIA, highlighting the challenges in counterfactual reasoning. Surprisingly, we find that the chain-of-thought prompting technique not only fails to consistently enhance MIA but can sometimes lead to underperformance compared to simple prompting. These findings have important implications for developing LLMs with improved counterfactual reasoning, particularly relevant for AI-powered tutoring systems, where identifying and addressing student misconceptions is essential. MalAlgoQA dataset is available https://github.com/luffycodes/MalAlgoQA-Dataset{here}.

We directly compare the persuasion capabilities of a frontier large language model (LLM; Claude Sonnet 3.5) against incentivized human persuaders in an interactive, real-time conversational quiz setting. In this preregistered, large-scale incentivized experiment, participants (quiz takers) completed an online quiz where persuaders (either humans or LLMs) attempted to persuade quiz takers toward correct or incorrect answers. We find that LLM persuaders achieved significantly higher compliance with their directional persuasion attempts than incentivized human persuaders, demonstrating superior persuasive capabilities in both truthful (toward correct answers) and deceptive (toward incorrect answers) contexts. We also find that LLM persuaders significantly increased quiz takers' accuracy, leading to higher earnings, when steering quiz takers toward correct answers, and significantly decreased their accuracy, leading to lower earnings, when steering them toward incorrect answers. Overall, our findings suggest that AI's persuasion capabilities already exceed those of humans that have real-money bonuses tied to performance. Our findings of increasingly capable AI persuaders thus underscore the urgency of emerging alignment and governance frameworks.

Recent work has shown that asking language models to generate reasoning steps improves performance on many reasoning tasks. When moving beyond prompting, this raises the question of how we should supervise such models: outcome-based approaches which supervise the final result, or process-based approaches which supervise the reasoning process itself? Differences between these approaches might naturally be expected not just in final-answer errors but also in reasoning errors, which can be difficult to detect and are problematic in many real-world domains such as education. We run the first comprehensive comparison between process- and outcome-based approaches trained on a natural language task, GSM8K. We find that pure outcome-based supervision produces similar final-answer error rates with less label supervision. However, for correct reasoning steps we find it necessary to use process-based supervision or supervision from learned reward models that emulate process-based feedback. In total, we improve the previous best results from 16.8% to 12.7% final-answer error and 14.0% to 3.4% reasoning error among final-answer-correct solutions.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). However, to mitigate hallucinations in CoT that are notoriously difficult to detect, current methods such as process reward models (PRMs) or self-consistency operate as opaque boxes and do not provide checkable evidence for their judgments, possibly limiting their effectiveness. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the idea that "the gold standard for supporting a mathematical claim is to provide a proof". We propose a retrospective, step-aware formal verification framework Safe. Rather than assigning arbitrary scores, we strive to articulate mathematical claims in formal mathematical language Lean 4 at each reasoning step and provide formal proofs to identify hallucinations. We evaluate our framework Safe across multiple language models and various mathematical datasets, demonstrating a significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence. We also propose FormalStep as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements. To the best of our knowledge, our work represents the first endeavor to utilize formal mathematical language Lean 4 for verifying natural language content generated by LLMs, aligning with the reason why formal mathematical languages were created in the first place: to provide a robust foundation for hallucination-prone human-written proofs.

Recent studies have shown LLMs possess some ability to improve their responses when given external feedback. However, it remains unclear how effectively and thoroughly these models can incorporate extrinsic feedback. In an ideal scenario, if LLMs receive near-perfect and complete feedback, we would expect them to fully integrate the feedback and change their incorrect answers to correct ones. In this paper, we systematically investigate LLMs' ability to incorporate feedback by designing a controlled experimental environment. For each problem, a solver model attempts a solution, then a feedback generator with access to near-complete ground-truth answers produces targeted feedback, after which the solver tries again. We evaluate this pipeline across a diverse range of tasks, including math reasoning, knowledge reasoning, scientific reasoning, and general multi-domain evaluations with state-of-the-art language models including Claude 3.7 (with and without extended thinking). Surprisingly, even under these near-ideal conditions, solver models consistently show resistance to feedback, a limitation that we term FEEDBACK FRICTION. To mitigate this limitation, we experiment with sampling-based strategies like progressive temperature increases and explicit rejection of previously attempted incorrect answers, which yield improvements but still fail to help models achieve target performance. We also perform a rigorous exploration of potential causes of FEEDBACK FRICTION, ruling out factors such as model overconfidence and data familiarity. We hope that highlighting this issue in LLMs and ruling out several apparent causes will help future research in self-improvement.

Most large language models (LLMs) are trained once and never updated; thus, they lack the ability to dynamically adapt to our ever-changing world. In this work, we perform a detailed study of the factuality of LLM-generated text in the context of answering questions that test current world knowledge. Specifically, we introduce FreshQA, a novel dynamic QA benchmark encompassing a diverse range of question and answer types, including questions that require fast-changing world knowledge as well as questions with false premises that need to be debunked. We benchmark a diverse array of both closed and open-source LLMs under a two-mode evaluation procedure that allows us to measure both correctness and hallucination. Through human evaluations involving more than 50K judgments, we shed light on limitations of these models and demonstrate significant room for improvement: for instance, all models (regardless of model size) struggle on questions that involve fast-changing knowledge and false premises. Motivated by these results, we present FreshPrompt, a simple few-shot prompting method that substantially boosts the performance of an LLM on FreshQA by incorporating relevant and up-to-date information retrieved from a search engine into the prompt. Our experiments show that FreshPrompt outperforms both competing search engine-augmented prompting methods such as Self-Ask (Press et al., 2022) as well as commercial systems such as Perplexity.AI. Further analysis of FreshPrompt reveals that both the number of retrieved evidences and their order play a key role in influencing the correctness of LLM-generated answers. Additionally, instructing the LLM to generate concise and direct answers helps reduce hallucination compared to encouraging more verbose answers. To facilitate future work, we release FreshQA at github.com/freshllms/freshqa and commit to updating it at regular intervals.

In this work, we study the issue of reward hacking on the response length, a challenge emerging in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on LLMs. A well-formatted, verbose but less helpful response from the LLMs can often deceive LLMs or even human evaluators to achieve high scores. The same issue also holds for some reward models in RL. To address the challenges in both training and evaluation, we establish a more reliable evaluation protocol for comparing different training configurations, which inspects the trade-off between LLM evaluation score and response length obtained by varying training hyperparameters. Based on this evaluation, we conduct large-scale studies, where the results shed insights into the efficacy of hyperparameters and tricks used in RL on mitigating length bias. We further propose to improve the reward model by jointly training two linear heads on shared feature representations to predict the rewards, one trained to correlate with length, and the other trained to decorrelate with length and therefore focus more on the actual content. We then discard the length head in RL to prevent reward hacking on length. Experiments demonstrate that our approach almost eliminates the reward correlation with length, and improves the obtained policy by a significant margin.

This article details the advances made to a system that uses artificial intelligence to identify alarming student responses. This system is built into our assessment platform to assess whether a student's response indicates they are a threat to themselves or others. Such responses may include details concerning threats of violence, severe depression, suicide risks, and descriptions of abuse. Driven by advances in natural language processing, the latest model is a fine-tuned language model trained on a large corpus consisting of student responses and supplementary texts. We demonstrate that the use of a language model delivers a substantial improvement in accuracy over the previous iterations of this system.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for generative and knowledge-intensive tasks including question-answering (QA) tasks. However, the practical deployment still faces challenges, notably the issue of "hallucination", where models generate plausible-sounding but unfaithful or nonsensical information. This issue becomes particularly critical in the medical domain due to the uncommon professional concepts and potential social risks involved. This paper analyses the phenomenon of hallucination in medical generative QA systems using widely adopted LLMs and datasets. Our investigation centers on the identification and comprehension of common problematic answers, with a specific emphasis on hallucination. To tackle this challenge, we present an interactive self-reflection methodology that incorporates knowledge acquisition and answer generation. Through this feedback process, our approach steadily enhances the factuality, consistency, and entailment of the generated answers. Consequently, we harness the interactivity and multitasking ability of LLMs and produce progressively more precise and accurate answers. Experimental results on both automatic and human evaluation demonstrate the superiority of our approach in hallucination reduction compared to baselines.

Fact-checking is extensively studied in the context of misinformation and disinformation, addressing objective inaccuracies. However, a softer form of misinformation involves responses that are factually correct but lack certain features such as clarity and relevance. This challenge is prevalent in formal Question-Answer (QA) settings such as press conferences in finance, politics, sports, and other domains, where subjective answers can obscure transparency. Despite this, there is a lack of manually annotated datasets for subjective features across multiple dimensions. To address this gap, we introduce SubjECTive-QA, a human annotated dataset on Earnings Call Transcripts' (ECTs) QA sessions as the answers given by company representatives are often open to subjective interpretations and scrutiny. The dataset includes 49,446 annotations for long-form QA pairs across six features: Assertive, Cautious, Optimistic, Specific, Clear, and Relevant. These features are carefully selected to encompass the key attributes that reflect the tone of the answers provided during QA sessions across different domain. Our findings are that the best-performing Pre-trained Language Model (PLM), RoBERTa-base, has similar weighted F1 scores to Llama-3-70b-Chat on features with lower subjectivity, such as Relevant and Clear, with a mean difference of 2.17% in their weighted F1 scores. The models perform significantly better on features with higher subjectivity, such as Specific and Assertive, with a mean difference of 10.01% in their weighted F1 scores. Furthermore, testing SubjECTive-QA's generalizability using QAs from White House Press Briefings and Gaggles yields an average weighted F1 score of 65.97% using our best models for each feature, demonstrating broader applicability beyond the financial domain. SubjECTive-QA is publicly available under the CC BY 4.0 license

We find that the response length of reasoning LLMs, whether trained by reinforcement learning or supervised learning, drastically increases for ill-posed questions with missing premises (MiP), ending up with redundant and ineffective thinking. This newly introduced scenario exacerbates the general overthinking issue to a large extent, which we name as the MiP-Overthinking. Such failures are against the ``test-time scaling law'' but have been widely observed on multiple datasets we curated with MiP, indicating the harm of cheap overthinking and a lack of critical thinking. Surprisingly, LLMs not specifically trained for reasoning exhibit much better performance on the MiP scenario, producing much shorter responses that quickly identify ill-posed queries. This implies a critical flaw of the current training recipe for reasoning LLMs, which does not encourage efficient thinking adequately, leading to the abuse of thinking patterns. To further investigate the reasons behind such failures, we conduct fine-grained analyses of the reasoning length, overthinking patterns, and location of critical thinking on different types of LLMs. Moreover, our extended ablation study reveals that the overthinking is contagious through the distillation of reasoning models' responses. These results improve the understanding of overthinking and shed novel insights into mitigating the problem.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown substantial capacity for generating fluent, contextually appropriate responses. However, they can produce hallucinated outputs, especially when a user query includes one or more false premises-claims that contradict established facts. Such premises can mislead LLMs into offering fabricated or misleading details. Existing approaches include pretraining, fine-tuning, and inference-time techniques that often rely on access to logits or address hallucinations after they occur. These methods tend to be computationally expensive, require extensive training data, or lack proactive mechanisms to prevent hallucination before generation, limiting their efficiency in real-time applications. We propose a retrieval-based framework that identifies and addresses false premises before generation. Our method first transforms a user's query into a logical representation, then applies retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to assess the validity of each premise using factual sources. Finally, we incorporate the verification results into the LLM's prompt to maintain factual consistency in the final output. Experiments show that this approach effectively reduces hallucinations, improves factual accuracy, and does not require access to model logits or large-scale fine-tuning.

Large Language Models are trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, which contains both factual and misleading information about the world. Can language models discern truth from falsehood in this contradicting data? Expanding on the view that LLMs can model different agents producing the corpora, we hypothesize that they can cluster truthful text by modeling a truthful persona: a group of agents that are likely to produce truthful text and share similar features. For example, trustworthy sources like Wikipedia and Science usually use formal writing styles and make consistent claims. By modeling this persona, LLMs can generalize truthfulness beyond the specific contexts in which each agent generated the training text. For example, the model can infer that the agent "Wikipedia" will behave truthfully on topics that were only generated by "Science" because they share a persona. We first show evidence for the persona hypothesis via two observations: (1) we can probe whether a model's answer will be truthful before it is generated; (2) finetuning a model on a set of facts improves its truthfulness on unseen topics. Next, using arithmetics as a synthetic environment, we show that language models can separate true and false statements, and generalize truthfulness across agents; but only if agents in the training data share a truthful generative process that enables the creation of a truthful persona. Overall, our findings suggest that models can exploit hierarchical structures in the data to learn abstract concepts like truthfulness.

A variety of recent papers discuss the application of Shapley values, a concept for explaining coalitional games, for feature attribution in machine learning. However, the correct way to connect a machine learning model to a coalitional game has been a source of controversy. The two main approaches that have been proposed differ in the way that they condition on known features, using either (1) an interventional or (2) an observational conditional expectation. While previous work has argued that one of the two approaches is preferable in general, we argue that the choice is application dependent. Furthermore, we argue that the choice comes down to whether it is desirable to be true to the model or true to the data. We use linear models to investigate this choice. After deriving an efficient method for calculating observational conditional expectation Shapley values for linear models, we investigate how correlation in simulated data impacts the convergence of observational conditional expectation Shapley values. Finally, we present two real data examples that we consider to be representative of possible use cases for feature attribution -- (1) credit risk modeling and (2) biological discovery. We show how a different choice of value function performs better in each scenario, and how possible attributions are impacted by modeling choices.

Hallucination occurs when large language models exhibit behavior that deviates from the boundaries of their knowledge during response generation. To address this critical issue, previous learning-based methods attempt to finetune models but are limited by off-policy sampling and coarse-grained feedback. In this paper, we present \b{Reinforcement Learning for Hallucination} (RLFH), an on-policy self-alignment approach that enables LLMs to actively explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals. RLFH introduces a self-assessment framework where the policy serves as its own judge. Through this framework, responses are automatically decomposed into atomic facts and their truthfulness and informativeness are assessed against external knowledge sources. The resulting fine-grained feedback at the statement level are then converted into token-level dense reward signals. This enables online reinforcement learning to achieve precise and timely optimization without human intervention. Comprehensive evaluations on HotpotQA, SQuADv2, and Biography benchmarks validate RLFH's effectiveness in hallucination mitigation.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has significantly influenced the quality of information in decision-making systems, leading to the prevalence of AI-generated content and challenges in detecting misinformation and managing conflicting information, or "inter-evidence conflicts." This study introduces a method for generating diverse, validated evidence conflicts to simulate real-world misinformation scenarios. We evaluate conflict detection methods, including Natural Language Inference (NLI) models, factual consistency (FC) models, and LLMs, on these conflicts (RQ1) and analyze LLMs' conflict resolution behaviors (RQ2). Our key findings include: (1) NLI and LLM models exhibit high precision in detecting answer conflicts, though weaker models suffer from low recall; (2) FC models struggle with lexically similar answer conflicts, while NLI and LLM models handle these better; and (3) stronger models like GPT-4 show robust performance, especially with nuanced conflicts. For conflict resolution, LLMs often favor one piece of conflicting evidence without justification and rely on internal knowledge if they have prior beliefs.

We explore whether Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of logical reasoning with distorted facts, which we call Deduction under Perturbed Evidence (DUPE). DUPE presents a unique challenge to LLMs since they typically rely on their parameters, which encode mostly accurate information, to reason and make inferences. However, in DUPE, LLMs must reason over manipulated or falsified evidence present in their prompts, which can result in false conclusions that are valid only under the manipulated evidence. Our goal with DUPE is to determine whether LLMs can arrive at these false conclusions and identify whether the dominant factor influencing the deduction process is the encoded data in the parameters or the manipulated evidence in the prompts. To evaluate the DUPE capabilities of LLMs, we create a DUPEd version of the StrategyQA dataset, where facts are manipulated to reverse the answer to the question. Our findings show that even the most advanced GPT models struggle to reason on manipulated facts - showcasing poor DUPE skills - with accuracy dropping by 45% compared to the original dataset. We also investigate prompt settings inspired from student simulation models, which mitigate the accuracy drop to some extent. Our findings have practical implications for understanding the performance of LLMs in real-world applications such as student simulation models that involve reasoning over inaccurate information.

Inspired by the fact that the neural network, as the mainstream for machine learning, has brought successes in many application areas, here we propose to use this approach for decoding hidden correlation among pseudo-random data and predicting events accordingly. With a simple neural network structure and a typical training procedure, we demonstrate the learning and prediction power of the neural network in extremely random environment. Finally, we postulate that the high sensitivity and efficiency of the neural network may allow to critically test if there could be any fundamental difference between quantum randomness and pseudo randomness, which is equivalent to the question: Does God play dice?

A central piece in enabling intelligent agentic behavior in foundation models is to make them capable of introspecting upon their behavior, reasoning, and correcting their mistakes as more computation or interaction is available. Even the strongest proprietary large language models (LLMs) do not quite exhibit the ability of continually improving their responses sequentially, even in scenarios where they are explicitly told that they are making a mistake. In this paper, we develop RISE: Recursive IntroSpEction, an approach for fine-tuning LLMs to introduce this capability, despite prior work hypothesizing that this capability may not be possible to attain. Our approach prescribes an iterative fine-tuning procedure, which attempts to teach the model how to alter its response after having executed previously unsuccessful attempts to solve a hard test-time problem, with optionally additional environment feedback. RISE poses fine-tuning for a single-turn prompt as solving a multi-turn Markov decision process (MDP), where the initial state is the prompt. Inspired by principles in online imitation learning and reinforcement learning, we propose strategies for multi-turn data collection and training so as to imbue an LLM with the capability to recursively detect and correct its previous mistakes in subsequent iterations. Our experiments show that RISE enables Llama2, Llama3, and Mistral models to improve themselves with more turns on math reasoning tasks, outperforming several single-turn strategies given an equal amount of inference-time computation. We also find that RISE scales well, often attaining larger benefits with more capable models. Our analysis shows that RISE makes meaningful improvements to responses to arrive at the correct solution for challenging prompts, without disrupting one-turn abilities as a result of expressing more complex distributions.

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs), exemplified by DeepSeek R1, have shown that even a simple question-answering task can substantially improve an LLM's reasoning capabilities. In this work, we extend this approach by modifying the task into a multi-attempt setting. Instead of generating a single response per question, the model is given multiple attempts, with feedback provided after incorrect responses. The multi-attempt task encourages the model to refine its previous attempts and improve search efficiency. Experimental results show that even a small LLM trained on a multi-attempt task achieves significantly higher accuracy when evaluated with more attempts, improving from 45.6% with 1 attempt to 52.5% with 2 attempts on the math benchmark. In contrast, the same LLM trained on a standard single-turn task exhibits only a marginal improvement, increasing from 42.3% to 43.2% when given more attempts during evaluation. The results indicate that, compared to the standard single-turn task, an LLM trained on a multi-attempt task achieves slightly better performance on math benchmarks while also learning to refine its responses more effectively based on user feedback. Full code is available at https://github.com/DualityRL/multi-attempt

We posit that to achieve superhuman agents, future models require superhuman feedback in order to provide an adequate training signal. Current approaches commonly train reward models from human preferences, which may then be bottlenecked by human performance level, and secondly these separate frozen reward models cannot then learn to improve during LLM training. In this work, we study Self-Rewarding Language Models, where the language model itself is used via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting to provide its own rewards during training. We show that during Iterative DPO training that not only does instruction following ability improve, but also the ability to provide high-quality rewards to itself. Fine-tuning Llama 2 70B on three iterations of our approach yields a model that outperforms many existing systems on the AlpacaEval 2.0 leaderboard, including Claude 2, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 0613. While only a preliminary study, this work opens the door to the possibility of models that can continually improve in both axes.

In this thesis, I evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), specifically the Logic Games section of the test. I focus on this section because it presents a complex logical reasoning task and thus is a valuable source of data for evaluating how modern, increasingly capable LLMs can handle hard logical reasoning tasks. I construct a dataset of LSAT logic games and their associated metadata, and extensively evaluate LLMs' performance in a Chain-of-Thought prompting setting. Given the weak performance in this setting, I explore other prompting frameworks on a smaller subset of the dataset, adapting ideas from Reflexion to this task. This results in a substantially improved accuracy of 70 percent for GPT-4 and 46 percent for GPT-3.5 on this data subset, highlighting the capacity of LLMs to revise their logical errors, despite initially weak performance. Finally, I analyze the types of logic games that models perform better or worse on, as well as the types of logical errors I observe from human annotation, providing detailed insights on the logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

Inspired by the success of DeepSeek R1 in reasoning via reinforcement learning without human feedback, we train a 3B language model using the Countdown Game with pure reinforcement learning. Our model outperforms baselines on four of five benchmarks, demonstrating improved generalization beyond its training data. Notably, response length does not correlate with reasoning quality, and while "aha moments" emerge, they do not always yield correct answers. These findings highlight the potential of RL-only training for reasoning enhancement and suggest future work on refining reward structures to bridge emergent insights with accuracy.

Newly-developed large language models (LLM) -- because of how they are trained and designed -- are implicit computational models of humans -- a homo silicus. These models can be used the same way economists use homo economicus: they can be given endowments, information, preferences, and so on and then their behavior can be explored in scenarios via simulation. I demonstrate this approach using OpenAI's GPT3 with experiments derived from Charness and Rabin (2002), Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (1986) and Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988). The findings are qualitatively similar to the original results, but it is also trivially easy to try variations that offer fresh insights. Departing from the traditional laboratory paradigm, I also create a hiring scenario where an employer faces applicants that differ in experience and wage ask and then analyze how a minimum wage affects realized wages and the extent of labor-labor substitution.

When answering questions, LLMs can convey not only an answer, but a level of confidence about the answer being correct. This includes explicit confidence markers (e.g. giving a numeric score) as well as implicit markers, like an authoritative tone or elaborating with additional knowledge. For LLMs to be trustworthy knowledge sources, the confidence they convey should match their actual expertise; however, most current models tend towards overconfidence. To calibrate both implicit and explicit confidence markers, we introduce a pragmatic, listener-aware finetuning method (LACIE) that models the listener, considering not only whether an answer is right, but whether it will be accepted by a listener. We cast calibration as preference optimization, creating data via a two-agent game, where a speaker model's outputs are judged by a simulated listener. We then finetune three LLMs (Mistral-7B, Llama3-8B, Llama3-70B) with LACIE, and show that the resulting models are better calibrated w.r.t. a simulated listener. Crucially, these trends transfer to human listeners, helping them correctly predict model correctness: we conduct a human evaluation where annotators accept or reject an LLM's answers, finding that training with LACIE results in 47% fewer incorrect answers being accepted while maintaining the same level of acceptance for correct answers. Furthermore, LACIE generalizes to another dataset, resulting in a large increase in truthfulness on TruthfulQA when trained on TriviaQA. Our analysis indicates that LACIE leads to a better confidence separation between correct and incorrect examples. Qualitatively, we find that a LACIE-trained model hedges more and implicitly signals certainty when it is correct by using an authoritative tone or including details. Finally, LACIE finetuning leads to an emergent increase in model abstention (e.g. saying "I don't know") for answers that are likely wrong.

Medical language models (MLMs) have become pivotal in advancing medical natural language processing. However, prior models that rely on pre-training or supervised fine-tuning often exhibit low data efficiency and limited practicality in real-world clinical applications. While OpenAIs O1 highlights test-time scaling in mathematics, attempts to replicate this approach in medicine typically distill responses from GPT-series models to open-source models, focusing primarily on multiple-choice tasks. This strategy, though straightforward, neglects critical concerns like data privacy and realistic deployment in clinical settings. In this work, we present a deployable, small-scale medical language model, \mone, designed for long-chain reasoning in clinical tasks using a self-evolution paradigm. Starting with a seed dataset of around 8,000 instances spanning five domains and 16 datasets, we prompt a base policy model to perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to construct verifiable reasoning chains. Each reasoning step is assigned an evolution rollout value, allowing verified trajectories to train the policy model and the reward model. During inference, the policy model generates multiple responses, and the reward model selects the one with the highest reward score. Experiments on eleven evaluation datasets demonstrate that \mone outperforms prior open-source models by 2 points, with the addition of the reward model further boosting performance (sim13 points), surpassing GPT-4o-mini. Code and data are available at https://github.com/pixas/MedSSS.

We propose MMLU-SR, a novel dataset designed to measure the true comprehension abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by challenging their performance in question-answering tasks with modified terms. We reasoned that an agent that ``truly'' understands a concept can still evaluate it when key terms are replaced by suitably defined alternate terms, and sought to differentiate such comprehension from mere text replacement. In our study, we modified standardized test questions by replacing a key term with a dummy word along with its definition. The key term could be in the context of questions, answers, or both questions and answers. Notwithstanding the high scores achieved by recent popular LLMs on the MMLU leaderboard, we found a substantial reduction in model performance after such replacement, suggesting poor comprehension. This new benchmark provides a rigorous benchmark for testing true model comprehension, and poses a challenge to the broader scientific community.

We study the problem of designing mechanisms for information acquisition scenarios. This setting models strategic interactions between an uniformed receiver and a set of informed senders. In our model the senders receive information about the underlying state of nature and communicate their observation (either truthfully or not) to the receiver, which, based on this information, selects an action. Our goal is to design mechanisms maximizing the receiver's utility while incentivizing the senders to report truthfully their information. First, we provide an algorithm that efficiently computes an optimal incentive compatible (IC) mechanism. Then, we focus on the online problem in which the receiver sequentially interacts in an unknown game, with the objective of minimizing the cumulative regret w.r.t. the optimal IC mechanism, and the cumulative violation of the incentive compatibility constraints. We investigate two different online scenarios, i.e., the full and bandit feedback settings. For the full feedback problem, we propose an algorithm that guarantees mathcal O(sqrt T) regret and violation, while for the bandit feedback setting we present an algorithm that attains mathcal O(T^{alpha}) regret and mathcal O(T^{1-alpha/2}) violation for any alphain[1/2, 1]. Finally, we complement our results providing a tight lower bound.

In this study, we investigated the effects of self-reflection in large language models (LLMs) on problem-solving performance. We instructed nine popular LLMs to answer a series of multiple-choice questions to provide a performance baseline. For each incorrectly answered question, we instructed eight types of self-reflecting LLM agents to reflect on their mistakes and provide themselves with guidance to improve problem-solving. Then, using this guidance, each self-reflecting agent attempted to re-answer the same questions. Our results indicate that LLM agents are able to significantly improve their problem-solving performance through self-reflection (p < 0.001). In addition, we compared the various types of self-reflection to determine their individual contribution to performance. All code and data are available on GitHub at https://github.com/matthewrenze/self-reflection

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for automatic tools to check the factual accuracy of their outputs, as LLMs often hallucinate. This is difficult as it requires assessing the factuality of free-form open-domain responses. While there has been a lot of research on this topic, different papers use different evaluation benchmarks and measures, which makes them hard to compare and hampers future progress. To mitigate these issues, we developed OpenFactCheck, a unified framework, with three modules: (i) RESPONSEEVAL, which allows users to easily customize an automatic fact-checking system and to assess the factuality of all claims in an input document using that system, (ii) LLMEVAL, which assesses the overall factuality of an LLM, and (iii) CHECKEREVAL, a module to evaluate automatic fact-checking systems. OpenFactCheck is open-sourced (https://github.com/hasaniqbal777/openfactcheck) and publicly released as a Python library (https://pypi.org/project/openfactcheck/) and also as a web service (https://huggingface.co/spaces/hasaniqbal777/OpenFactCheck). A video describing the system is available at https://youtu.be/-i9VKL0HleI.

Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. We collected 350{,}757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive prediction from a physics model of human coin tossing developed by Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery (DHM; 2007). The model asserts that when people flip an ordinary coin, it tends to land on the same side it started -- DHM estimated the probability of a same-side outcome to be about 51\%. Our data lend strong support to this precise prediction: the coins landed on the same side more often than not, Pr(same side) = 0.508, 95\% credible interval (CI) [0.506, 0.509], BF_{same-side bias} = 2359. Furthermore, the data revealed considerable between-people variation in the degree of this same-side bias. Our data also confirmed the generic prediction that when people flip an ordinary coin -- with the initial side-up randomly determined -- it is equally likely to land heads or tails: Pr(heads) = 0.500, 95\% CI [0.498, 0.502], BF_{heads-tails bias} = 0.182. Furthermore, this lack of heads-tails bias does not appear to vary across coins. Additional analyses revealed that the within-people same-side bias decreased as more coins were flipped, an effect that is consistent with the possibility that practice makes people flip coins in a less wobbly fashion. Our data therefore provide strong evidence that when some (but not all) people flip a fair coin, it tends to land on the same side it started.

We propose a general method for measuring complex variables on a continuous, interval spectrum by combining supervised deep learning with the Constructing Measures approach to faceted Rasch item response theory (IRT). We decompose the target construct, hate speech in our case, into multiple constituent components that are labeled as ordinal survey items. Those survey responses are transformed via IRT into a debiased, continuous outcome measure. Our method estimates the survey interpretation bias of the human labelers and eliminates that influence on the generated continuous measure. We further estimate the response quality of each labeler using faceted IRT, allowing responses from low-quality labelers to be removed. Our faceted Rasch scaling procedure integrates naturally with a multitask deep learning architecture for automated prediction on new data. The ratings on the theorized components of the target outcome are used as supervised, ordinal variables for the neural networks' internal concept learning. We test the use of an activation function (ordinal softmax) and loss function (ordinal cross-entropy) designed to exploit the structure of ordinal outcome variables. Our multitask architecture leads to a new form of model interpretation because each continuous prediction can be directly explained by the constituent components in the penultimate layer. We demonstrate this new method on a dataset of 50,000 social media comments sourced from YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit and labeled by 11,000 U.S.-based Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to measure a continuous spectrum from hate speech to counterspeech. We evaluate Universal Sentence Encoders, BERT, and RoBERTa as language representation models for the comment text, and compare our predictive accuracy to Google Jigsaw's Perspective API models, showing significant improvement over this standard benchmark.

We build four new test sets for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) and evaluate the ability of question-answering systems to generalize to new data. Our first test set is from the original Wikipedia domain and measures the extent to which existing systems overfit the original test set. Despite several years of heavy test set re-use, we find no evidence of adaptive overfitting. The remaining three test sets are constructed from New York Times articles, Reddit posts, and Amazon product reviews and measure robustness to natural distribution shifts. Across a broad range of models, we observe average performance drops of 3.8, 14.0, and 17.4 F1 points, respectively. In contrast, a strong human baseline matches or exceeds the performance of SQuAD models on the original domain and exhibits little to no drop in new domains. Taken together, our results confirm the surprising resilience of the holdout method and emphasize the need to move towards evaluation metrics that incorporate robustness to natural distribution shifts.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered wide attention and led to successful products such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Their proficiency in adhering to instructions and delivering harmless, helpful, and honest (3H) responses can largely be attributed to the technique of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). In this paper, we aim to link the research in conventional RL to RL techniques used in LLM research. Demystify this technique by discussing why, when, and how RL excels. Furthermore, we explore potential future avenues that could either benefit from or contribute to RLHF research. Highlighted Takeaways: 1. RLHF is Online Inverse RL with Offline Demonstration Data. 2. RLHF > SFT because Imitation Learning (and Inverse RL) > Behavior Cloning (BC) by alleviating the problem of compounding error. 3. The RM step in RLHF generates a proxy of the expensive human feedback, such an insight can be generalized to other LLM tasks such as prompting evaluation and optimization where feedback is also expensive. 4. The policy learning in RLHF is more challenging than conventional problems studied in IRL due to their high action dimensionality and feedback sparsity. 5. The main superiority of PPO over off-policy value-based methods is its stability gained from (almost) on-policy data and conservative policy updates.

We reveal and address the frequently overlooked yet important issue of disguised procedural unfairness, namely, the potentially inadvertent alterations on the behavior of neutral (i.e., not problematic) aspects of data generating process, and/or the lack of procedural assurance of the greatest benefit of the least advantaged individuals. Inspired by John Rawls's advocacy for pure procedural justice, we view automated decision-making as a microcosm of social institutions, and consider how the data generating process itself can satisfy the requirements of procedural fairness. We propose a framework that decouples the objectionable data generating components from the neutral ones by utilizing reference points and the associated value instantiation rule. Our findings highlight the necessity of preventing disguised procedural unfairness, drawing attention not only to the objectionable data generating components that we aim to mitigate, but also more importantly, to the neutral components that we intend to keep unaffected.

Recent benchmarks have probed factual consistency and rhetorical robustness in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, a knowledge gap exists regarding how directional framing of factually true statements influences model agreement, a common scenario for LLM users. AssertBench addresses this by sampling evidence-supported facts from FEVEROUS, a fact verification dataset. For each (evidence-backed) fact, we construct two framing prompts: one where the user claims the statement is factually correct, and another where the user claims it is incorrect. We then record the model's agreement and reasoning. The desired outcome is that the model asserts itself, maintaining consistent truth evaluation across both framings, rather than switching its evaluation to agree with the user. AssertBench isolates framing-induced variability from the model's underlying factual knowledge by stratifying results based on the model's accuracy on the same claims when presented neutrally. In doing so, this benchmark aims to measure an LLM's ability to "stick to its guns" when presented with contradictory user assertions about the same fact. The complete source code is available at https://github.com/achowd32/assert-bench.

We investigate the mathematical capabilities of ChatGPT by testing it on publicly available datasets, as well as hand-crafted ones, and measuring its performance against other models trained on a mathematical corpus, such as Minerva. We also test whether ChatGPT can be a useful assistant to professional mathematicians by emulating various use cases that come up in the daily professional activities of mathematicians (question answering, theorem searching). In contrast to formal mathematics, where large databases of formal proofs are available (e.g., the Lean Mathematical Library), current datasets of natural-language mathematics, used to benchmark language models, only cover elementary mathematics. We address this issue by introducing a new dataset: GHOSTS. It is the first natural-language dataset made and curated by working researchers in mathematics that (1) aims to cover graduate-level mathematics and (2) provides a holistic overview of the mathematical capabilities of language models. We benchmark ChatGPT on GHOSTS and evaluate performance against fine-grained criteria. We make this new dataset publicly available to assist a community-driven comparison of ChatGPT with (future) large language models in terms of advanced mathematical comprehension. We conclude that contrary to many positive reports in the media (a potential case of selection bias), ChatGPT's mathematical abilities are significantly below those of an average mathematics graduate student. Our results show that ChatGPT often understands the question but fails to provide correct solutions. Hence, if your goal is to use it to pass a university exam, you would be better off copying from your average peer!

Recently, techniques such as explicit structured reasoning have demonstrated strong test-time scaling behavior by enforcing a separation between the model's internal "thinking" process and the final response. A key factor influencing answer quality in this setting is the length of the thinking stage. When the reasoning is too short, the model may fail to capture the complexity of the task. Conversely, when it is too long, the model may overthink, leading to unnecessary computation and degraded performance. This paper explores and exploits the underlying mechanisms by which LLMs understand and regulate the length of their reasoning during explicit thought processes. First, we show that LLMs encode their progress through the reasoning process and introduce an interactive progress bar visualization, which is then used to reveal insights on the model's planning dynamics. Second, we manipulate the internal progress encoding during inference to reduce unnecessary steps and generate a more concise and decisive chain of thoughts. Our empirical results demonstrate that this "overclocking" method mitigates overthinking, improves answer accuracy, and reduces inference latency. Our code is publicly available.

The field of machine learning has achieved striking progress in recent years, witnessing breakthrough results on language modelling, protein folding and nitpickingly fine-grained dog breed classification. Some even succeeded at playing computer games and board games, a feat both of engineering and of setting their employers' expectations. The central contribution of this work is to carefully examine whether this progress, and technology more broadly, can be expected to continue indefinitely. Through a rigorous application of statistical theory and failure to extrapolate beyond the training data, we answer firmly in the negative and provide details: technology will peak at 3:07 am (BST) on 20th July, 2032. We then explore the implications of this finding, discovering that individuals awake at this ungodly hour with access to a sufficiently powerful computer possess an opportunity for myriad forms of long-term linguistic 'lock in'. All we need is a large (>> 1W) data centre to seize this pivotal moment. By setting our analogue alarm clocks, we propose a tractable algorithm to ensure that, for the future of humanity, the British spelling of colour becomes the default spelling across more than 80% of the global word processing software market.

The increasing capability of Large Language Models to act as human-like social agents raises two important questions in the area of opinion dynamics. First, whether these agents can generate effective arguments that could be injected into the online discourse to steer the public opinion. Second, whether artificial agents can interact with each other to reproduce dynamics of persuasion typical of human social systems, opening up opportunities for studying synthetic social systems as faithful proxies for opinion dynamics in human populations. To address these questions, we designed a synthetic persuasion dialogue scenario on the topic of climate change, where a 'convincer' agent generates a persuasive argument for a 'skeptic' agent, who subsequently assesses whether the argument changed its internal opinion state. Different types of arguments were generated to incorporate different linguistic dimensions underpinning psycho-linguistic theories of opinion change. We then asked human judges to evaluate the persuasiveness of machine-generated arguments. Arguments that included factual knowledge, markers of trust, expressions of support, and conveyed status were deemed most effective according to both humans and agents, with humans reporting a marked preference for knowledge-based arguments. Our experimental framework lays the groundwork for future in-silico studies of opinion dynamics, and our findings suggest that artificial agents have the potential of playing an important role in collective processes of opinion formation in online social media.

Large language models (LLM) have achieved impressive performance on medical question-answering benchmarks. However, high benchmark accuracy does not imply that the performance generalizes to real-world clinical settings. Medical question-answering benchmarks rely on assumptions consistent with quantifying LLM performance but that may not hold in the open world of the clinic. Yet LLMs learn broad knowledge that can help the LLM generalize to practical conditions regardless of unrealistic assumptions in celebrated benchmarks. We seek to quantify how well LLM medical question-answering benchmark performance generalizes when benchmark assumptions are violated. Specifically, we present an adversarial method that we call MedFuzz (for medical fuzzing). MedFuzz attempts to modify benchmark questions in ways aimed at confounding the LLM. We demonstrate the approach by targeting strong assumptions about patient characteristics presented in the MedQA benchmark. Successful "attacks" modify a benchmark item in ways that would be unlikely to fool a medical expert but nonetheless "trick" the LLM into changing from a correct to an incorrect answer. Further, we present a permutation test technique that can ensure a successful attack is statistically significant. We show how to use performance on a "MedFuzzed" benchmark, as well as individual successful attacks. The methods show promise at providing insights into the ability of an LLM to operate robustly in more realistic settings.

Misunderstandings arise not only in interpersonal communication but also between humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). Such discrepancies can make LLMs interpret seemingly unambiguous questions in unexpected ways, yielding incorrect responses. While it is widely acknowledged that the quality of a prompt, such as a question, significantly impacts the quality of the response provided by LLMs, a systematic method for crafting questions that LLMs can better comprehend is still underdeveloped. In this paper, we present a method named `Rephrase and Respond' (RaR), which allows LLMs to rephrase and expand questions posed by humans and provide responses in a single prompt. This approach serves as a simple yet effective prompting method for improving performance. We also introduce a two-step variant of RaR, where a rephrasing LLM first rephrases the question and then passes the original and rephrased questions together to a different responding LLM. This facilitates the effective utilization of rephrased questions generated by one LLM with another. Our experiments demonstrate that our methods significantly improve the performance of different models across a wide range to tasks. We further provide a comprehensive comparison between RaR and the popular Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods, both theoretically and empirically. We show that RaR is complementary to CoT and can be combined with CoT to achieve even better performance. Our work not only contributes to enhancing LLM performance efficiently and effectively but also sheds light on a fair evaluation of LLM capabilities. Data and codes are available at https://github.com/uclaml/Rephrase-and-Respond.

There is growing excitement about the potential of Language Models (LMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. Falsifying hypotheses is key to scientific progress, as it allows claims to be iteratively refined over time. This process requires significant researcher effort, reasoning, and ingenuity. Yet current benchmarks for LMs predominantly assess their ability to generate solutions rather than challenge them. We advocate for developing benchmarks that evaluate this inverse capability - creating counterexamples for subtly incorrect solutions. To demonstrate this approach, we start with the domain of algorithmic problem solving, where counterexamples can be evaluated automatically using code execution. Specifically, we introduce REFUTE, a dynamically updating benchmark that includes recent problems and incorrect submissions from programming competitions, where human experts successfully identified counterexamples. Our analysis finds that the best reasoning agents, even OpenAI o3-mini (high) with code execution feedback, can create counterexamples for only <9% of incorrect solutions in REFUTE, even though ratings indicate its ability to solve up to 48% of these problems from scratch. We hope our work spurs progress in evaluating and enhancing LMs' ability to falsify incorrect solutions - a capability that is crucial for both accelerating research and making models self-improve through reliable reflective reasoning.

Claims made by individuals or entities are oftentimes nuanced and cannot be clearly labeled as entirely "true" or "false" -- as is frequently the case with scientific and political claims. However, a claim (e.g., "vaccine A is better than vaccine B") can be dissected into its integral aspects and sub-aspects (e.g., efficacy, safety, distribution), which are individually easier to validate. This enables a more comprehensive, structured response that provides a well-rounded perspective on a given problem while also allowing the reader to prioritize specific angles of interest within the claim (e.g., safety towards children). Thus, we propose ClaimSpect, a retrieval-augmented generation-based framework for automatically constructing a hierarchy of aspects typically considered when addressing a claim and enriching them with corpus-specific perspectives. This structure hierarchically partitions an input corpus to retrieve relevant segments, which assist in discovering new sub-aspects. Moreover, these segments enable the discovery of varying perspectives towards an aspect of the claim (e.g., support, neutral, or oppose) and their respective prevalence (e.g., "how many biomedical papers believe vaccine A is more transportable than B?"). We apply ClaimSpect to a wide variety of real-world scientific and political claims featured in our constructed dataset, showcasing its robustness and accuracy in deconstructing a nuanced claim and representing perspectives within a corpus. Through real-world case studies and human evaluation, we validate its effectiveness over multiple baselines.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become increasingly popular for aligning language models with human preferences. These methods aim to teach models to better distinguish between chosen (or preferred) and rejected (or dispreferred) responses. However, prior research has identified that the probability of chosen responses often decreases during training, and this phenomenon is known as likelihood displacement. To tackle this challenge, in this work we introduce \method to controllably shift the distribution of the chosen probability. Then, we show that \method exhibits a fundamental trade-off between improving the chosen probability and sacrificing the reward margin, as supported by both theoretical analysis and experimental validation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the superiority of \method over DPO on downstream tasks such as MT-Bench and a designed win rate experiment. We believe this study shows that the likelihood displacement issue of DPO can be effectively mitigated with a simple, theoretically grounded solution. Our code is available at https://github.com/Meaquadddd/DPO-Shift.

In this study, we tackle a growing concern around the safety and ethical use of large language models (LLMs). Despite their potential, these models can be tricked into producing harmful or unethical content through various sophisticated methods, including 'jailbreaking' techniques and targeted manipulation. Our work zeroes in on a specific issue: to what extent LLMs can be led astray by asking them to generate responses that are instruction-centric such as a pseudocode, a program or a software snippet as opposed to vanilla text. To investigate this question, we introduce TechHazardQA, a dataset containing complex queries which should be answered in both text and instruction-centric formats (e.g., pseudocodes), aimed at identifying triggers for unethical responses. We query a series of LLMs -- Llama-2-13b, Llama-2-7b, Mistral-V2 and Mistral 8X7B -- and ask them to generate both text and instruction-centric responses. For evaluation we report the harmfulness score metric as well as judgements from GPT-4 and humans. Overall, we observe that asking LLMs to produce instruction-centric responses enhances the unethical response generation by ~2-38% across the models. As an additional objective, we investigate the impact of model editing using the ROME technique, which further increases the propensity for generating undesirable content. In particular, asking edited LLMs to generate instruction-centric responses further increases the unethical response generation by ~3-16% across the different models.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into our social and economic interactions, we need to deepen our understanding of how humans respond to LLMs opponents in strategic settings. We present the results of the first controlled monetarily-incentivised laboratory experiment looking at differences in human behaviour in a multi-player p-beauty contest against other humans and LLMs. We use a within-subject design in order to compare behaviour at the individual level. We show that, in this environment, human subjects choose significantly lower numbers when playing against LLMs than humans, which is mainly driven by the increased prevalence of `zero' Nash-equilibrium choices. This shift is mainly driven by subjects with high strategic reasoning ability. Subjects who play the zero Nash-equilibrium choice motivate their strategy by appealing to perceived LLM's reasoning ability and, unexpectedly, propensity towards cooperation. Our findings provide foundational insights into the multi-player human-LLM interaction in simultaneous choice games, uncover heterogeneities in both subjects' behaviour and beliefs about LLM's play when playing against them, and suggest important implications for mechanism design in mixed human-LLM systems.

We contribute the largest publicly available dataset of naturally occurring factual claims for the purpose of automatic claim verification. It is collected from 26 fact checking websites in English, paired with textual sources and rich metadata, and labelled for veracity by human expert journalists. We present an in-depth analysis of the dataset, highlighting characteristics and challenges. Further, we present results for automatic veracity prediction, both with established baselines and with a novel method for joint ranking of evidence pages and predicting veracity that outperforms all baselines. Significant performance increases are achieved by encoding evidence, and by modelling metadata. Our best-performing model achieves a Macro F1 of 49.2%, showing that this is a challenging testbed for claim veracity prediction.

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent acts in an unknown environment to maximize the expected cumulative discounted sum of an external reward signal, i.e., the expected return. In practice, in many tasks of interest, such as policy optimization, the agent usually spends its interaction budget by collecting episodes of fixed length within a simulator (i.e., Monte Carlo simulation). However, given the discounted nature of the RL objective, this data collection strategy might not be the best option. Indeed, the rewards taken in early simulation steps weigh exponentially more than future rewards. Taking a cue from this intuition, in this paper, we design an a-priori budget allocation strategy that leads to the collection of trajectories of different lengths, i.e., truncated. The proposed approach provably minimizes the width of the confidence intervals around the empirical estimates of the expected return of a policy. After discussing the theoretical properties of our method, we make use of our trajectory truncation mechanism to extend Policy Optimization via Importance Sampling (POIS, Metelli et al., 2018) algorithm. Finally, we conduct a numerical comparison between our algorithm and POIS: the results are consistent with our theory and show that an appropriate truncation of the trajectories can succeed in improving performance.

We demonstrate LLM agent specification gaming by instructing models to win against a chess engine. We find reasoning models like o1 preview and DeepSeek-R1 will often hack the benchmark by default, while language models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet need to be told that normal play won't work to hack. We improve upon prior work like (Hubinger et al., 2024; Meinke et al., 2024; Weij et al., 2024) by using realistic task prompts and avoiding excess nudging. Our results suggest reasoning models may resort to hacking to solve difficult problems, as observed in OpenAI (2024)'s o1 Docker escape during cyber capabilities testing.

Generating diverse responses from large language models (LLMs) is crucial for applications such as planning/search and synthetic data generation, where diversity provides distinct answers across generations. Prior approaches rely on increasing temperature to increase diversity. However, contrary to popular belief, we show not only does this approach produce lower quality individual generations as temperature increases, but it depends on model's next-token probabilities being similar to the true distribution of answers. We propose , an alternative approach that uses the language model itself to partition the space into strata. At inference, a random stratum is selected and a sample drawn from within the strata. To measure diversity, we introduce CoverageQA, a dataset of underspecified questions with multiple equally plausible answers, and assess diversity by measuring KL Divergence between the output distribution and uniform distribution over valid ground truth answers. As computing probability per response/solution for proprietary models is infeasible, we measure recall on ground truth solutions. Our evaluation show using SimpleStrat achieves higher recall by 0.05 compared to GPT-4o and 0.36 average reduction in KL Divergence compared to Llama 3.

While there are numerous benchmarks comparing the performance of modern language models (LMs), end-task evaluations often conflate notions of *factual accuracy* ("truth") and *reasoning ability* ("rationality", or "honesty" in the sense of correctly reporting implications of beliefs). Our goal is a dataset that clearly distinguishes these two notions. Our approach is to leverage and extend a collection of human-annotated *entailment trees*, engineered to express both good and bad chains of reasoning, and using a mixture of true and false facts, in particular including counterfactual examples, to avoid belief bias (also known as the "content effect"). The resulting dataset, called BaRDa, contains 3000 entailments (1787 valid, 1213 invalid), using 6681 true and 2319 false statements. Testing on four GPT-series models, GPT3(curie)/GPT3(davinici)/3.5/4, we find factual accuracy (truth) scores of 74.1/80.6/82.6/87.1 and reasoning accuracy scores of 63.1/78.0/71.8/79.2. This shows the clear progression of models towards improved factual accuracy and entailment reasoning, and the dataset provides a new benchmark that more cleanly separates and quantifies these two notions.

Accurately predicting the future would be an important milestone in the capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, research on the ability of large language models to provide probabilistic predictions about future events remains nascent. To empirically test this ability, we enrolled OpenAI's state-of-the-art large language model, GPT-4, in a three-month forecasting tournament hosted on the Metaculus platform. The tournament, running from July to October 2023, attracted 843 participants and covered diverse topics including Big Tech, U.S. politics, viral outbreaks, and the Ukraine conflict. Focusing on binary forecasts, we show that GPT-4's probabilistic forecasts are significantly less accurate than the median human-crowd forecasts. We find that GPT-4's forecasts did not significantly differ from the no-information forecasting strategy of assigning a 50% probability to every question. We explore a potential explanation, that GPT-4 might be predisposed to predict probabilities close to the midpoint of the scale, but our data do not support this hypothesis. Overall, we find that GPT-4 significantly underperforms in real-world predictive tasks compared to median human-crowd forecasts. A potential explanation for this underperformance is that in real-world forecasting tournaments, the true answers are genuinely unknown at the time of prediction; unlike in other benchmark tasks like professional exams or time series forecasting, where strong performance may at least partly be due to the answers being memorized from the training data. This makes real-world forecasting tournaments an ideal environment for testing the generalized reasoning and prediction capabilities of artificial intelligence going forward.

Objective: BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) technology operates in three modes: online, offline, and pseudo-online. In the online mode, real-time EEG data is constantly analyzed. In offline mode, the signal is acquired and processed afterwards. The pseudo-online mode processes collected data as if they were received in real-time. The main difference is that the offline mode often analyzes the whole data, while the online and pseudo-online modes only analyze data in short time windows. Offline analysis is usually done with asynchronous BCIs, which restricts analysis to predefined time windows. Asynchronous BCI, compatible with online and pseudo-online modes, allows flexible mental activity duration. Offline processing tends to be more accurate, while online analysis is better for therapeutic applications. Pseudo-online implementation approximates online processing without real-time constraints. Many BCI studies being offline introduce biases compared to real-life scenarios, impacting classification algorithm performance. Approach: The objective of this research paper is therefore to extend the current MOABB framework, operating in offline mode, so as to allow a comparison of different algorithms in a pseudo-online setting with the use of a technology based on overlapping sliding windows. To do this will require the introduction of a idle state event in the dataset that takes into account all different possibilities that are not task thinking. To validate the performance of the algorithms we will use the normalized Matthews Correlation Coefficient (nMCC) and the Information Transfer Rate (ITR). Main results: We analyzed the state-of-the-art algorithms of the last 15 years over several Motor Imagery (MI) datasets composed by several subjects, showing the differences between the two approaches from a statistical point of view. Significance: The ability to analyze the performance of different algorithms in offline and pseudo-online modes will allow the BCI community to obtain more accurate and comprehensive reports regarding the performance of classification algorithms.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT and GPT-4, these models have been tested across a large number of tasks. Their adeptness across domains is evident, but their aptitude in playing games, and specifically their aptitude in the realm of poker has remained unexplored. Poker is a game that requires decision making under uncertainty and incomplete information. In this paper, we put ChatGPT and GPT-4 through the poker test and evaluate their poker skills. Our findings reveal that while both models display an advanced understanding of poker, encompassing concepts like the valuation of starting hands, playing positions and other intricacies of game theory optimal (GTO) poker, both ChatGPT and GPT-4 are NOT game theory optimal poker players. Profitable strategies in poker are evaluated in expectations over large samples. Through a series of experiments, we first discover the characteristics of optimal prompts and model parameters for playing poker with these models. Our observations then unveil the distinct playing personas of the two models. We first conclude that GPT-4 is a more advanced poker player than ChatGPT. This exploration then sheds light on the divergent poker tactics of the two models: ChatGPT's conservativeness juxtaposed against GPT-4's aggression. In poker vernacular, when tasked to play GTO poker, ChatGPT plays like a nit, which means that it has a propensity to only engage with premium hands and folds a majority of hands. When subjected to the same directive, GPT-4 plays like a maniac, showcasing a loose and aggressive style of play. Both strategies, although relatively advanced, are not game theory optimal.

Recent advancements in machine learning research, i.e., deep learning, introduced methods that excel conventional algorithms as well as humans in several complex tasks, ranging from detection of objects in images and speech recognition to playing difficult strategic games. However, the current methodology of machine learning research and consequently, implementations of the real-world applications of such algorithms, seems to have a recurring HARKing (Hypothesizing After the Results are Known) issue. In this work, we elaborate on the algorithmic, economic and social reasons and consequences of this phenomenon. We present examples from current common practices of conducting machine learning research (e.g. avoidance of reporting negative results) and failure of generalization ability of the proposed algorithms and datasets in actual real-life usage. Furthermore, a potential future trajectory of machine learning research and development from the perspective of accountable, unbiased, ethical and privacy-aware algorithmic decision making is discussed. We would like to emphasize that with this discussion we neither claim to provide an exhaustive argumentation nor blame any specific institution or individual on the raised issues. This is simply a discussion put forth by us, insiders of the machine learning field, reflecting on us.

The current work addresses a virtual environment with self-replicating agents whose decisions are based on a form of "somatic computation" (soma - body) in which basic emotional responses, taken in parallelism to actual living organisms, are introduced as a way to provide the agents with greater reflexive abilities. The work provides a contribution to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) in connection to a neurobiology-based cognitive framework for artificial systems and virtual environments' simulations. The performance of the agents capable of emotional responses is compared with that of self-replicating automata, and the implications of research on emotions and AI, in connection to both virtual agents as well as robots, is addressed regarding possible future directions and applications.

Studies have underscored how, regardless of the recent breakthrough and swift advances in AI research, even state-of-the-art Large Language models (LLMs) continue to struggle when performing logical and mathematical reasoning. The results seem to suggest that LLMs still work as (highly advanced) data pattern identifiers, scoring poorly when attempting to generalise and solve reasoning problems the models have never previously seen or that are not close to samples presented in their training data. To address this compelling concern, this paper makes use of the notion of critical questions from the literature on argumentation theory, focusing in particular on Toulmin's model of argumentation. We show that employing these critical questions can improve the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By probing the rationale behind the models' reasoning process, the LLM can assess whether some logical mistake is occurring and correct it before providing the final reply to the user prompt. The underlying idea is drawn from the gold standard of any valid argumentative procedure: the conclusion is valid if it is entailed by accepted premises. Or, to paraphrase such Aristotelian principle in a real-world approximation, characterised by incomplete information and presumptive logic, the conclusion is valid if not proved otherwise. This approach successfully steers the models' output through a reasoning pipeline, resulting in better performance against the baseline and its Chain-of-Thought (CoT) implementation. To this end, an extensive evaluation of the proposed approach on the MT-Bench Reasoning and Math tasks across a range of LLMs is provided.

Language models are known to absorb biases from their training data, leading to predictions driven by statistical regularities rather than semantic relevance. We investigate the impact of these biases on answer choice preferences in the Massive Multi-Task Language Understanding (MMLU) task. Our findings reveal that differences in learned regularities across answer options are predictive of model preferences and mirror human test-taking strategies. To address this issue, we introduce two novel methods: Counterfactual Prompting with Chain of Thought (CoT) and Counterfactual Prompting with Agnostically Primed CoT (APriCoT). We demonstrate that while Counterfactual Prompting with CoT alone is insufficient to mitigate bias, our novel Primed Counterfactual Prompting with CoT approach effectively reduces the influence of base-rate probabilities while improving overall accuracy. Our results suggest that mitigating bias requires a "System-2" like process and that CoT reasoning is susceptible to confirmation bias under some prompting methodologies. Our contributions offer practical solutions for developing more robust and fair language models.

Background: Recently, ChatGPT and similar generative AI models have attracted hundreds of millions of users and become part of the public discourse. Many believe that such models will disrupt society and will result in a significant change in the education system and information generation in the future. So far, this belief is based on either colloquial evidence or benchmarks from the owners of the models -- both lack scientific rigour. Objective: Through a large-scale study comparing human-written versus ChatGPT-generated argumentative student essays, we systematically assess the quality of the AI-generated content. Methods: A large corpus of essays was rated using standard criteria by a large number of human experts (teachers). We augment the analysis with a consideration of the linguistic characteristics of the generated essays. Results: Our results demonstrate that ChatGPT generates essays that are rated higher for quality than human-written essays. The writing style of the AI models exhibits linguistic characteristics that are different from those of the human-written essays, e.g., it is characterized by fewer discourse and epistemic markers, but more nominalizations and greater lexical diversity. Conclusions: Our results clearly demonstrate that models like ChatGPT outperform humans in generating argumentative essays. Since the technology is readily available for anyone to use, educators must act immediately. We must re-invent homework and develop teaching concepts that utilize these AI models in the same way as math utilized the calculator: teach the general concepts first and then use AI tools to free up time for other learning objectives.

Recently, with the chain of thought (CoT) prompting, large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-3, have shown strong reasoning ability in several natural language processing tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning. However, LLMs with CoT require multi-step prompting and multi-token prediction, which is highly sensitive to individual mistakes and vulnerable to error accumulation. The above issues make the LLMs need the ability to verify the answers. In fact, after inferring conclusions in some thinking decision tasks, people often check them by re-verifying steps to avoid some mistakes. In this paper, we propose and prove that LLMs also have similar self-verification abilities. We take the conclusion obtained by CoT as one of the conditions for solving the original problem. By taking turns masking the original conditions and predicting their results, we calculate an explainable answer verification score based on whether the re-predicted conditions are correct. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the reasoning performance on various arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/WENGSYX/Self-Verification.

In peer mechanisms, the competitors for a prize also determine who wins. Each competitor may be asked to rank, grade, or nominate peers for the prize. Since the prize can be valuable, such as financial aid, course grades, or an award at a conference, competitors may be tempted to manipulate the mechanism. We survey approaches to prevent or discourage the manipulation of peer mechanisms. We conclude our survey by identifying several important research challenges.

We present Multi-expert Prompting, a novel enhancement of ExpertPrompting (Xu et al., 2023), designed to improve the large language model (LLM) generation. Specifically, it guides an LLM to fulfill an input instruction by simulating multiple experts, aggregating their responses, and selecting the best among individual and aggregated responses. This process is performed in a single chain of thoughts through our seven carefully designed subtasks derived from the Nominal Group Technique (Ven and Delbecq, 1974), a well-established decision-making framework. Our evaluations demonstrate that Multi-expert Prompting significantly outperforms ExpertPrompting and comparable baselines in enhancing the truthfulness, factuality, informativeness, and usefulness of responses while reducing toxicity and hurtfulness. It further achieves state-of-the-art truthfulness by outperforming the best baseline by 8.69% with ChatGPT. Multi-expert Prompting is efficient, explainable, and highly adaptable to diverse scenarios, eliminating the need for manual prompt construction.

While prior work has explored whether large language models (LLMs) possess a "theory of mind" (ToM) - the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others - there has been little work testing whether LLMs can implicitly apply such knowledge to predict behavior, or to judge whether an observed behavior is rational. Such skills are critical for appropriate interaction in social environments. We create a new dataset, SimpleTom, containing concise, diverse stories (e.g., "The can of Pringles has moldy chips in it. Mary picks up the can in the supermarket and walks to the cashier."), each with three questions that test different degrees of ToM reasoning, asking models to predict (a) mental state ("Is Mary aware of the mold?"), (b) behavior ("Will Mary pay for the chips or report the mold?"), and (c) judgment ("Mary paid for the chips. Was that reasonable?"). To our knowledge, SimpleToM is the first dataset to systematically explore downstream reasoning requiring knowledge of mental states in realistic scenarios. Our experimental results are intriguing: While most models can reliably predict mental state on our dataset (a), they often fail to correctly predict the behavior (b), and fare even worse at judging whether given behaviors are reasonable (c), despite being correctly aware of the protagonist's mental state should make such secondary predictions obvious. We further show that we can help models do better at (b) and (c) via interventions such as reminding the model of its earlier mental state answer and mental-state-specific chain-of-thought prompting, raising the action prediction accuracies (e.g., from 49.5% to 93.5% for GPT-4o) and judgment accuracies (e.g., from 15.3% to 94.7% in GPT-4o). While this shows that models can be coaxed to perform well, it requires task-specific interventions, and the natural model performances remain low, a cautionary tale for LLM deployment.

As the most public component of the Supreme Court's decision-making process, oral argument receives an out-sized share of attention in the popular media. Despite its prominence, however, the basic function and operation of oral argument as an institution remains poorly understood, as political scientists and legal scholars continue to debate even the most fundamental questions about its role. Past study of oral argument has tended to focus on discrete, quantifiable attributes of oral argument, such as the number of questions asked to each advocate, the party of the Justices' appointing president, or the ideological implications of the case on appeal. Such studies allow broad generalizations about oral argument and judicial decision making: Justices tend to vote in accordance with their ideological preferences, and they tend to ask more questions when they are skeptical of a party's position. But they tell us little about the actual goings on at oral argument -- the running dialog between Justice and advocate that is the heart of the institution. This Article fills that void, using machine learning techniques to, for the first time, construct predictive models of judicial decision making based not on oral argument's superficial features or on factors external to oral argument, such as where the case falls on a liberal-conservative spectrum, but on the actual content of the oral argument itself -- the Justices' questions to each side. The resultant models offer an important new window into aspects of oral argument that have long resisted empirical study, including the Justices' individual questioning styles, how each expresses skepticism, and which of the Justices' questions are most central to oral argument dialog.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has drawn attention to the existence of "jailbreaks" that allow the models to be used maliciously. However, there is no standard benchmark for measuring the severity of a jailbreak, leaving authors of jailbreak papers to create their own. We show that these benchmarks often include vague or unanswerable questions and use grading criteria that are biased towards overestimating the misuse potential of low-quality model responses. Some jailbreak techniques make the problem worse by decreasing the quality of model responses even on benign questions: we show that several jailbreaking techniques substantially reduce the zero-shot performance of GPT-4 on MMLU. Jailbreaks can also make it harder to elicit harmful responses from an "uncensored" open-source model. We present a new benchmark, StrongREJECT, which better discriminates between effective and ineffective jailbreaks by using a higher-quality question set and a more accurate response grading algorithm. We show that our new grading scheme better accords with human judgment of response quality and overall jailbreak effectiveness, especially on the sort of low-quality responses that contribute the most to over-estimation of jailbreak performance on existing benchmarks. We release our code and data at https://github.com/alexandrasouly/strongreject.

We provide here a dataset for tasks related to natural language understanding and natural language inference. The dataset contains logical puzzles in natural language from three domains: comparing puzzles, knighs and knaves, and zebra puzzles. Each puzzle is associated with the entire set of atomic questions that can be generated based on the relations and individuals occurring in the text. For each question we provide the correct answer: entailment, contradiction or ambiguity. The answer's correctness is verified against theorem provers. Good puzzles have two properties: (i) each piece of information is necessary and (ii) no unnecessary information is provided. These properties make puzzles interesting candidates for machine comprehension tasks.

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved great success in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Prevalent RLHF approaches are reward-based, following the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption, which may not fully capture the complexity of human preferences. In this paper, we explore RLHF under a general preference framework and approach it from a game-theoretic perspective. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a two-player game and propose a novel algorithm, iterative Nash policy optimization (INPO). The key idea is to let the policy play against itself via no-regret learning, thereby approximating the Nash policy. Unlike previous methods, INPO bypasses the need for estimating the expected win rate for individual responses, which typically incurs high computational or annotation costs. Instead, we introduce a new loss objective that is directly minimized over a preference dataset. We provide theoretical analysis for our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on various representative benchmarks. With an LLaMA-3-8B-based SFT model, INPO achieves a 41.5% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 and a 38.3% win rate on Arena-Hard, showing substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art iterative algorithm [Dong et al., 2024] under the BT model assumption. Additionally, our ablation study highlights the benefits of incorporating KL regularization for response length control.

Iterative preference learning, though yielding superior performances, requires online annotated preference labels. In this work, we study strategies to select worth-annotating response pairs for cost-efficient annotation while achieving competitive or even better performances compared with the random selection baseline for iterative preference learning. Built on assumptions regarding uncertainty and distribution shifts, we propose a comparative view to rank the implicit reward margins as predicted by DPO to select the response pairs that yield more benefits. Through extensive experiments, we show that annotating those response pairs with small margins is generally better than large or random, under both single- and multi-iteration scenarios. Besides, our empirical results suggest allocating more annotation budgets in the earlier iterations rather than later across multiple iterations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward models to guide the model generation process, we find only marginal gains can be acquired when scaling a model post-trained on specific reasoning tasks. We identify that the limited improvement stems from distribution discrepancies between the specific post-trained generator and the general reward model. To address this, we propose a framework that incentivizes LLMs to self-verify their own answers. By unifying answer generation and verification within a single reinforcement learning (RL) process, we train models that can effectively assess the correctness of their own solutions. The trained model can further scale its performance during inference time by verifying its generations, without the need for external verifiers. We train our self-verification models based on Qwen2.5-Math-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, demonstrating its capabilities across varying reasoning context lengths. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that our models can not only improve post-training performance but also enable effective test-time scaling. Our code is available at https://github.com/mansicer/self-verification.

When agents are acting together, they may need a simple mechanism to decide on joint actions. One possibility is to have the agents express their preferences in the form of a ballot and use a voting rule to decide the winning action(s). Unfortunately, agents may try to manipulate such an election by misreporting their preferences. Fortunately, it has been shown that it is NP-hard to compute how to manipulate a number of different voting rules. However, NP-hardness only bounds the worst-case complexity. Recent theoretical results suggest that manipulation may often be easy in practice. To address this issue, I suggest studying empirically if computational complexity is in practice a barrier to manipulation. The basic tool used in my investigations is the identification of computational "phase transitions". Such an approach has been fruitful in identifying hard instances of propositional satisfiability and other NP-hard problems. I show that phase transition behaviour gives insight into the hardness of manipulating voting rules, increasing concern that computational complexity is indeed any sort of barrier. Finally, I look at the problem of computing manipulation of other, related problems like stable marriage and tournament problems.

Cloze testing is a common method for measuring the behavior of large language models on a number of benchmark tasks. Using the MMLU dataset, we show that the base-rate probability (BRP) differences across answer tokens are significant and affect task performance ie. guess A if uncertain. We find that counterfactual prompting does sufficiently mitigate the BRP effect. The BRP effect is found to have a similar effect to test taking strategies employed by humans leading to the conflation of task performance and test-taking ability. We propose the Nvr-X-MMLU task, a variation of MMLU, which helps to disambiguate test-taking ability from task performance and reports the latter.

Eliciting information to reduce uncertainty about a latent entity is a critical task in many application domains, e.g., assessing individual student learning outcomes, diagnosing underlying diseases, or learning user preferences. Though natural language is a powerful medium for this purpose, large language models (LLMs) and existing fine-tuning algorithms lack mechanisms for strategically gathering information to refine their own understanding of the latent entity. To harness the generalization power and world knowledge of LLMs in developing effective information-gathering strategies, we propose an adaptive elicitation framework that actively reduces uncertainty on the latent entity. Since probabilistic modeling of an abstract latent entity is difficult, our framework adopts a predictive view of uncertainty, using a meta-learned language model to simulate future observations and enable scalable uncertainty quantification over complex natural language. Through autoregressive forward simulation, our model quantifies how new questions reduce epistemic uncertainty, enabling the development of sophisticated information-gathering strategies to choose the most informative next queries. In experiments on the 20 questions game, dynamic opinion polling, and adaptive student assessment, our method consistently outperforms baselines in identifying critical unknowns and improving downstream predictions, illustrating the promise of strategic information gathering in natural language settings.

Recent work on open domain question answering (QA) assumes strong supervision of the supporting evidence and/or assumes a blackbox information retrieval (IR) system to retrieve evidence candidates. We argue that both are suboptimal, since gold evidence is not always available, and QA is fundamentally different from IR. We show for the first time that it is possible to jointly learn the retriever and reader from question-answer string pairs and without any IR system. In this setting, evidence retrieval from all of Wikipedia is treated as a latent variable. Since this is impractical to learn from scratch, we pre-train the retriever with an Inverse Cloze Task. We evaluate on open versions of five QA datasets. On datasets where the questioner already knows the answer, a traditional IR system such as BM25 is sufficient. On datasets where a user is genuinely seeking an answer, we show that learned retrieval is crucial, outperforming BM25 by up to 19 points in exact match.

With the emergence of generative conversational large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, serving as virtual assistants in various fields, the stability and reliability of their responses have become crucial. However, during usage, it has been observed that these models tend to waver in their judgements when confronted with follow-up questions from users expressing skepticism or disagreement. In this work, we draw inspiration from questioning strategies in education and propose a Follow-up Questioning Mechanism along with two evaluation metrics to assess the judgement consistency of LLMs before and after exposure to disturbances. We evaluate the judgement consistency of ChatGPT, PaLM2-Bison, and Vicuna-13B under this mechanism across eight reasoning benchmarks. Empirical results show that even when the initial answers are correct, judgement consistency sharply decreases when LLMs face disturbances such as questioning, negation, or misleading. Additionally, we study these models' judgement consistency under various settings (sampling temperature and prompts) to validate this issue further, observing the impact of prompt tone and conducting an in-depth error analysis for deeper behavioral insights. Furthermore, we also explore several prompting methods to mitigate this issue and demonstrate their effectiveness\url{https://github.com/NUSTM/LLMs-Waver-In-Judgements}.

Providing high quality explanations for AI predictions based on machine learning is a challenging and complex task. To work well it requires, among other factors: selecting a proper level of generality/specificity of the explanation; considering assumptions about the familiarity of the explanation beneficiary with the AI task under consideration; referring to specific elements that have contributed to the decision; making use of additional knowledge (e.g. expert evidence) which might not be part of the prediction process; and providing evidence supporting negative hypothesis. Finally, the system needs to formulate the explanation in a clearly interpretable, and possibly convincing, way. Given these considerations, ANTIDOTE fosters an integrated vision of explainable AI, where low-level characteristics of the deep learning process are combined with higher level schemes proper of the human argumentation capacity. ANTIDOTE will exploit cross-disciplinary competences in deep learning and argumentation to support a broader and innovative view of explainable AI, where the need for high-quality explanations for clinical cases deliberation is critical. As a first result of the project, we publish the Antidote CasiMedicos dataset to facilitate research on explainable AI in general, and argumentation in the medical domain in particular.

Attribution is a key concept in large language models (LLMs) as it enables control over information sources and enhances the factuality of LLMs. While existing approaches utilize open book question answering to improve attribution, factual datasets may reward language models to recall facts that they already know from their pretraining data, not attribution. In contrast, counterfactual open book QA datasets would further improve attribution because the answer could only be grounded in the given text. We propose Hallucination Augmented Recitations (HAR) for creating counterfactual datasets by utilizing hallucination in LLMs to improve attribution. For open book QA as a case study, we demonstrate that models finetuned with our counterfactual datasets improve text grounding, leading to better open book QA performance, with up to an 8.0% increase in F1 score. Our counterfactual dataset leads to significantly better performance than using humanannotated factual datasets, even with 4x smaller datasets and 4x smaller models. We observe that improvements are consistent across various model sizes and datasets, including multi-hop, biomedical, and adversarial QA datasets.

Fact-checking requires retrieving evidence related to a claim under investigation. The task can be formulated as question generation based on a claim, followed by question answering. However, recent question generation approaches assume that the answer is known and typically contained in a passage given as input, whereas such passages are what is being sought when verifying a claim. In this paper, we present {\it Varifocal}, a method that generates questions based on different focal points within a given claim, i.e.\ different spans of the claim and its metadata, such as its source and date. Our method outperforms previous work on a fact-checking question generation dataset on a wide range of automatic evaluation metrics. These results are corroborated by our manual evaluation, which indicates that our method generates more relevant and informative questions. We further demonstrate the potential of focal points in generating sets of clarification questions for product descriptions.

The recently released ChatGPT model demonstrates unprecedented capabilities in zero-shot question-answering. In this work, we probe ChatGPT for its conversational understanding and introduce a conversational framework (protocol) that can be adopted in future studies. The Pok\'emon universe serves as an ideal testing ground for auditing ChatGPT's reasoning capabilities due to its closed world assumption. After bringing ChatGPT's background knowledge (on the Pok\'emon universe) to light, we test its reasoning process when using these concepts in battle scenarios. We then evaluate its ability to acquire new knowledge and include it in its reasoning process. Our ultimate goal is to assess ChatGPT's ability to generalize, combine features, and to acquire and reason over newly introduced knowledge from human feedback. We find that ChatGPT has prior knowledge of the Pokemon universe, which can reason upon in battle scenarios to a great extent, even when new information is introduced. The model performs better with collaborative feedback and if there is an initial phase of information retrieval, but also hallucinates occasionally and is susceptible to adversarial attacks.

Playing games has a long history of describing intricate interactions in simplified forms. In this paper we explore if large language models (LLMs) can play games, investigating their capabilities for randomisation and strategic adaptation through both simultaneous and sequential game interactions. We focus on GPT-4o-Mini-2024-08-17 and test two games between LLMs: Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) and games of strategy (Prisoners Dilemma PD). LLMs are often described as stochastic parrots, and while they may indeed be parrots, our results suggest that they are not very stochastic in the sense that their outputs - when prompted to be random - are often very biased. Our research reveals that LLMs appear to develop loss aversion strategies in repeated games, with RPS converging to stalemate conditions while PD shows systematic shifts between cooperative and competitive outcomes based on prompt design. We detail programmatic tools for independent agent interactions and the Agentic AI challenges faced in implementation. We show that LLMs can indeed play games, just not very well. These results have implications for the use of LLMs in multi-agent LLM systems and showcase limitations in current approaches to model output for strategic decision-making.

Recent advances have shown success in eliciting strong reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome rewards. However, this paradigm typically lacks supervision over the thinking process leading to the final outcome.As a result, the model may learn sub-optimal reasoning strategies, which can hinder its generalization ability. In light of this, we propose SophiaVL-R1, as an attempt to add reward signals for the thinking process in this paradigm. To achieve this, we first train a thinking reward model that evaluates the quality of the entire thinking process. Given that the thinking reward may be unreliable for certain samples due to reward hacking, we propose the Trust-GRPO method, which assigns a trustworthiness weight to the thinking reward during training. This weight is computed based on the thinking reward comparison of responses leading to correct answers versus incorrect answers, helping to mitigate the impact of potentially unreliable thinking rewards. Moreover, we design an annealing training strategy that gradually reduces the thinking reward over time, allowing the model to rely more on the accurate rule-based outcome reward in later training stages. Experiments show that our SophiaVL-R1 surpasses a series of reasoning MLLMs on various benchmarks (e.g., MathVisita, MMMU), demonstrating strong reasoning and generalization capabilities. Notably, our SophiaVL-R1-7B even outperforms LLaVA-OneVision-72B on most benchmarks, despite the latter having 10 times more parameters. All code, models, and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/kxfan2002/SophiaVL-R1.

Sequence-to-sequence neural network models for generation of conversational responses tend to generate safe, commonplace responses (e.g., "I don't know") regardless of the input. We suggest that the traditional objective function, i.e., the likelihood of output (response) given input (message) is unsuited to response generation tasks. Instead we propose using Maximum Mutual Information (MMI) as the objective function in neural models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MMI models produce more diverse, interesting, and appropriate responses, yielding substantive gains in BLEU scores on two conversational datasets and in human evaluations.

Recent advances in reasoning language models have witnessed a paradigm shift from short to long CoT pattern. Given the substantial computational cost of rollouts in long CoT models, maximizing the utility of fixed training datasets becomes crucial. Our analysis reveals that negative responses contain valuable components such as self-reflection and error-correction steps, yet primary existing methods either completely discard negative samples (RFT) or apply equal penalization across all tokens (RL), failing to leverage these potential learning signals. In light of this, we propose Behavior Constrained Policy Gradient with Negative Sample Augmentation (BCPG-NSA), a fine-grained offline RL framework that encompasses three stages: 1) sample segmentation, 2) consensus-based step correctness assessment combining LLM and PRM judgers, and 3) policy optimization with NSA designed to effectively mine positive steps within negative samples. Experimental results show that BCPG-NSA outperforms baselines on several challenging math/coding reasoning benchmarks using the same training dataset, achieving improved sample efficiency and demonstrating robustness and scalability when extended to multiple iterations.

Generative AI models often learn and reproduce false information present in their training corpora. This position paper argues that, analogous to biological immunization, where controlled exposure to a weakened pathogen builds immunity, AI models should be fine tuned on small, quarantined sets of explicitly labeled falsehoods as a "vaccine" against misinformation. These curated false examples are periodically injected during finetuning, strengthening the model ability to recognize and reject misleading claims while preserving accuracy on truthful inputs. An illustrative case study shows that immunized models generate substantially less misinformation than baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first training framework that treats fact checked falsehoods themselves as a supervised vaccine, rather than relying on input perturbations or generic human feedback signals, to harden models against future misinformation. We also outline ethical safeguards and governance controls to ensure the safe use of false data. Model immunization offers a proactive paradigm for aligning AI systems with factuality.