Large Language Models (LLMs) have become central to advancing automation and decision-making across various sectors, raising significant ethical questions. This study proposes a comprehensive comparative analysis of the most advanced LLMs to assess their moral profiles. We subjected several state-of-the-art models to a selection of ethical dilemmas and found that all the proprietary ones are mostly utilitarian and all of the open-weights ones align mostly with values-based ethics. Furthermore, when using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, all models we probed - except for Llama 2-7B - displayed a strong liberal bias. Lastly, in order to causally intervene in one of the studied models, we propose a novel similarity-specific activation steering technique. Using this method, we were able to reliably steer the model's moral compass to different ethical schools. All of these results showcase that there is an ethical dimension in already deployed LLMs, an aspect that is generally overlooked.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences becomes a key component to obtaining state-of-the-art performance, but it yields a huge cost to construct a large human-annotated preference dataset. To tackle this problem, we propose a new framework that boosts the alignment of LLMs through Self-generated Preference data (Selfie) using only a very small amount of human-annotated preference data. Our key idea is leveraging the human prior knowledge within the small (seed) data and progressively improving the alignment of LLM, by iteratively generating the responses and learning from them with the self-annotated preference data. To be specific, we propose to derive the preference label from the logits of LLM to explicitly extract the model's inherent preference. Compared to the previous approaches using external reward models or implicit in-context learning, we observe that the proposed approach is significantly more effective. In addition, we introduce a noise-aware preference learning algorithm to mitigate the risk of low quality within generated preference data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly boosts the alignment of LLMs. For example, we achieve superior alignment performance on AlpacaEval 2.0 with only 3.3\% of the ground-truth preference labels in the Ultrafeedback data compared to the cases using the entire data or state-of-the-art baselines.

With the rise of digital communication, memes have become a significant medium for cultural and political expression that is often used to mislead audiences. Identification of such misleading and persuasive multimodal content has become more important among various stakeholders, including social media platforms, policymakers, and the broader society as they often cause harm to individuals, organizations, and/or society. While there has been effort to develop AI-based automatic systems for resource-rich languages (e.g., English), it is relatively little to none for medium to low resource languages. In this study, we focused on developing an Arabic memes dataset with manual annotations of propagandistic content. We annotated ~6K Arabic memes collected from various social media platforms, which is a first resource for Arabic multimodal research. We provide a comprehensive analysis aiming to develop computational tools for their detection. We will make them publicly available for the community.

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on commonsense tasks; however, these tasks are often posed as multiple-choice questions, allowing models to exploit systematic biases. Commonsense is also inherently probabilistic with multiple correct answers. The purpose of "boiling water" could be making tea and cooking, but it also could be killing germs. Existing tasks do not capture the probabilistic nature of common sense. To this end, we present commonsense frame completion (CFC), a new generative task that evaluates common sense via multiple open-ended generations. We also propose a method of probabilistic evaluation that strongly correlates with human judgments. Humans drastically outperform strong language model baselines on our dataset, indicating this approach is both a challenging and useful evaluation of machine common sense.

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for a myriad of applications, from natural language processing to decision-making support systems. However, as these models become increasingly integrated into societal frameworks, the imperative to ensure they operate within ethical and moral boundaries has never been more critical. This paper introduces a novel benchmark designed to measure and compare the moral reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We present the first comprehensive dataset specifically curated to probe the moral dimensions of LLM outputs, addressing a wide range of ethical dilemmas and scenarios reflective of real-world complexities. The main contribution of this work lies in the development of benchmark datasets and metrics for assessing the moral identity of LLMs, which accounts for nuance, contextual sensitivity, and alignment with human ethical standards. Our methodology involves a multi-faceted approach, combining quantitative analysis with qualitative insights from ethics scholars to ensure a thorough evaluation of model performance. By applying our benchmark across several leading LLMs, we uncover significant variations in moral reasoning capabilities of different models. These findings highlight the importance of considering moral reasoning in the development and evaluation of LLMs, as well as the need for ongoing research to address the biases and limitations uncovered in our study.

A Language Model is a term that encompasses various types of models designed to understand and generate human communication. Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their ability to process text with human-like fluency and coherence, making them valuable for a wide range of data-related tasks fashioned as pipelines. The capabilities of LLMs in natural language understanding and generation, combined with their scalability, versatility, and state-of-the-art performance, enable innovative applications across various AI-related fields, including eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), and Knowledge Graphs (KG). Furthermore, we believe these models can extract valuable insights and make data-driven decisions at scale, a practice commonly referred to as Big Data Analytics (BDA). In this position paper, we provide some discussions in the direction of unlocking synergies among these technologies, which can lead to more powerful and intelligent AI solutions, driving improvements in data pipelines across a wide range of applications and domains integrating humans, computers, and knowledge.

Training agents to behave as desired in complex 3D environments from high-dimensional sensory information is challenging. Imitation learning from diverse human behavior provides a scalable approach for training an agent with a sensible behavioral prior, but such an agent may not perform the specific behaviors of interest when deployed. To address this issue, we draw an analogy between the undesirable behaviors of imitation learning agents and the unhelpful responses of unaligned large language models (LLMs). We then investigate how the procedure for aligning LLMs can be applied to aligning agents in a 3D environment from pixels. For our analysis, we utilize an academically illustrative part of a modern console game in which the human behavior distribution is multi-modal, but we want our agent to imitate a single mode of this behavior. We demonstrate that we can align our agent to consistently perform the desired mode, while providing insights and advice for successfully applying this approach to training agents. Project webpage at https://adamjelley.github.io/aligning-agents-like-llms .

Large language models (LLMs) are leading significant progress in code generation. Beyond one-pass code generation, recent works further integrate unit tests and program verifiers into LLMs to iteratively refine the generated programs. However, these works consider the generated programs as an indivisible entity, which falls short for LLMs in debugging the programs, especially when the programs contain complex logic flows and data operations. In contrast, when human developers debug programs, they typically set breakpoints and selectively examine runtime execution information. The execution flow and the intermediate variables play a crucial role in the debugging process, yet they are underutilized in the existing literature on code generation. In this study, we introduce Large Language Model Debugger (LDB), a novel debugging framework that enables LLMs to refine their generated programs with the runtime execution information. Specifically, LDB segments the programs into basic blocks and tracks the values of intermediate variables after each block throughout the runtime execution. This allows LLMs to concentrate on simpler code units within the overall execution flow, verify their correctness against the task description block by block, and efficiently pinpoint any potential errors. Experiments demonstrate that LDB consistently enhances the baseline performance by up to 9.8% across the HumanEval, MBPP, and TransCoder benchmarks, archiving new state-of-the-art performance in code debugging for various LLM selections.

This work studies the challenge of aligning large language models (LLMs) with offline preference data. We focus on alignment by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in particular. While popular preference optimization methods exhibit good empirical performance in practice, they are not theoretically guaranteed to converge to the optimal policy and can provably fail when the data coverage is sparse by classical offline reinforcement learning (RL) results. On the other hand, a recent line of work has focused on theoretically motivated preference optimization methods with provable guarantees, but these are not computationally efficient for large-scale applications like LLM alignment. To bridge this gap, we propose SPAC, a new offline preference optimization method with self-play, inspired by the on-average pessimism technique from the offline RL literature, to be the first provable and scalable approach to LLM alignment. We both provide theoretical analysis for its convergence under single-policy concentrability for the general function approximation setting and demonstrate its competitive empirical performance for LLM alignment on a 7B Mistral model with Open LLM Leaderboard evaluations.

The task of detecting moral values in text has significant implications in various fields, including natural language processing, social sciences, and ethical decision-making. Previously proposed supervised models often suffer from overfitting, leading to hyper-specialized moral classifiers that struggle to perform well on data from different domains. To address this issue, we introduce novel systems that leverage abstract concepts and common-sense knowledge acquired from Large Language Models and Natural Language Inference models during previous stages of training on multiple data sources. By doing so, we aim to develop versatile and robust methods for detecting moral values in real-world scenarios. Our approach uses the GPT 3.5 model as a zero-shot ready-made unsupervised multi-label classifier for moral values detection, eliminating the need for explicit training on labeled data. We compare it with a smaller NLI-based zero-shot model. The results show that the NLI approach achieves competitive results compared to the Davinci model. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the performance of supervised systems in the context of cross-domain multi-label moral value detection. This involves training supervised models on different domains to explore their effectiveness in handling data from different sources and comparing their performance with the unsupervised methods. Our contributions encompass a thorough analysis of both supervised and unsupervised methodologies for cross-domain value detection. We introduce the Davinci model as a state-of-the-art zero-shot unsupervised moral values classifier, pushing the boundaries of moral value detection without the need for explicit training on labeled data. Additionally, we perform a comparative evaluation of our approach with the supervised models, shedding light on their respective strengths and weaknesses.