Anne G. E. Collins

Jing-Jing Li, Valentina Pyatkin, Max Kleiman-Weiner et al. · allen-ai, cmu

The ideal AI safety moderation system would be both structurally interpretable (so its decisions can be reliably explained) and steerable (to align to safety standards and reflect a community's values), which current systems fall short on. To address this gap, we present SafetyAnalyst, a novel AI safety moderation framework. Given an AI behavior, SafetyAnalyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning to analyze its potential consequences by creating a structured "harm-benefit tree," which enumerates harmful and beneficial actions and effects the AI behavior may lead to, along with likelihood, severity, and immediacy labels that describe potential impacts on stakeholders. SafetyAnalyst then aggregates all effects into a harmfulness score using 28 fully interpretable weight parameters, which can be aligned to particular safety preferences. We applied this framework to develop an open-source LLM prompt safety classification system, distilled from 18.5 million harm-benefit features generated by frontier LLMs on 19k prompts. On comprehensive benchmarks, we show that SafetyAnalyst (average F1=0.81) outperforms existing moderation systems (average F1$<$0.72) on prompt safety classification, while offering the additional advantages of interpretability, transparency, and steerability.

Gaia Molinaro, Dave August, Danielle Perszyk et al.

As large language models (LLMs) get integrated into human decision-making, they are increasingly choosing goals autonomously rather than only completing human-defined ones, assuming they will reflect human preferences. However, human-LLM similarity in goal selection remains largely untested. We directly assess the validity of LLMs as proxies for human goal selection in a controlled, open-ended learning task borrowed from cognitive science. Across four state-of-the-art models (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Centaur), we find substantial divergence from human behavior. While people gradually explore and learn to achieve goals with diversity across individuals, most models exploit a single identified solution (reward hacking) or show surprisingly low performance, with distinct patterns across models and little variability across instances of the same model. Even Centaur, explicitly trained to emulate humans in experimental settings, poorly captures people's goal selection. Chain-of-thought reasoning and persona steering provide limited improvements. These findings highlight the uniqueness of human goal selection, cautioning against replacing it with current models in applications such as personal assistance, scientific discovery, and policy research.

Gaia Molinaro, Anne G. E. Collins

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose that goal-dependent learning is initially supported by a capacity-limited working memory system. With consistent experience, learners create a "compressed" reward function (a simplified rule defining the goal) which is then transferred to long-term memory and applied automatically upon receiving feedback. This process frees up working memory resources, boosting learning efficiency. We test this theory across six experiments. Consistent with our predictions, our findings demonstrate that learning is parametrically impaired by the size of the goal space, but improves when the goal space structure allows for compression. We also find faster reward processing to correlate with better learning performance, supporting the idea that as goal valuation becomes more automatic, more resources are available for learning. We leverage computational modeling to support this interpretation. Our work suggests that efficient goal-directed learning relies on compressing complex goal information into a stable reward function, shedding light on the cognitive mechanisms of human motivation. These findings generate new insights into the neuroscience of intrinsic motivation and could help improve behavioral techniques that support people in achieving their goals.