How Effective Is Constitutional AI in Small LLMs? A Study on DeepSeek-R1 and Its Peers

Recent incidents highlight safety risks in Large Language Models (LLMs), motivating research into alignment methods like Constitutional AI (CAI). This paper explores CAI's self-critique mechanism on small, uncensored 7-9B parameter models: DeepSeek-R1, Gemma-2, Llama 3.1, and Qwen2.5. Using HarmBench, we demonstrate that while all models showed capacity for harm reduction through self-critique, effectiveness varied significantly, with DeepSeek-R1's explicit reasoning process yielding superior results. These findings suggest that CAI-inspired prompting strategies can enhance safety in resource-constrained models, though success depends on the model's capacity for harm detection.