Muhua Huang

Muhua Huang, Qinlin Zhao, Xiaoyuan Yi et al.

As Large Language Models (LLM) based multi-agent systems become increasingly prevalent, the collective behaviors, e.g., collective intelligence, of such artificial communities have drawn growing attention. This work aims to answer a fundamental question: How does diversity of values shape the collective behavior of AI communities? Using naturalistic value elicitation grounded in the prevalent Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values, we constructed multi-agent simulations where communities with varying numbers of agents engaged in open-ended interactions and constitution formation. The results show that value diversity enhances value stability, fosters emergent behaviors, and brings more creative principles developed by the agents themselves without external guidance. However, these effects also show diminishing returns: extreme heterogeneity induces instability. This work positions value diversity as a new axis of future AI capability, bridging AI ability and sociological studies of institutional emergence.

Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Shitong Duan et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable breakthroughs, aligning their values with humans has become imperative for their responsible development and customized applications. However, there still lack evaluations of LLMs values that fulfill three desirable goals. (1) Value Clarification: We expect to clarify the underlying values of LLMs precisely and comprehensively, while current evaluations focus narrowly on safety risks such as bias and toxicity. (2) Evaluation Validity: Existing static, open-source benchmarks are prone to data contamination and quickly become obsolete as LLMs evolve. Additionally, these discriminative evaluations uncover LLMs' knowledge about values, rather than valid assessments of LLMs' behavioral conformity to values. (3) Value Pluralism: The pluralistic nature of human values across individuals and cultures is largely ignored in measuring LLMs value alignment. To address these challenges, we presents the Value Compass Benchmarks, with three correspondingly designed modules. It (i) grounds the evaluation on motivationally distinct \textit{basic values to clarify LLMs' underlying values from a holistic view; (ii) applies a \textit{generative evolving evaluation framework with adaptive test items for evolving LLMs and direct value recognition from behaviors in realistic scenarios; (iii) propose a metric that quantifies LLMs alignment with a specific value as a weighted sum over multiple dimensions, with weights determined by pluralistic values.

Muhua Huang, Xijuan Zhang, Christopher Soto et al.

We introduce a methodology for assigning quantifiable and psychometrically validated personalities to AI-Agents using the Big Five framework. Across three studies, we evaluate its feasibility and limitations. In Study 1, we show that large language models (LLMs) capture semantic similarities among Big Five measures, providing a basis for personality assignment. In Study 2, we create AI-Agents using prompts designed based on the Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2) in different format, and find that AI-Agents powered by new models align more closely with human responses on the Mini-Markers test, although the finer pattern of results (e.g., factor loading patterns) were sometimes inconsistent. In Study 3, we validate our AI-Agents on risk-taking and moral dilemma vignettes, finding that models prompted with the BFI-2-Expanded format most closely reproduce human personality-decision associations, while safety-aligned models generally inflate 'moral' ratings. Overall, our results show that AI-Agents align with humans in correlations between input Big Five traits and output responses and may serve as useful tools for preliminary research. Nevertheless, discrepancies in finer response patterns indicate that AI-Agents cannot (yet) fully substitute for human participants in precision or high-stakes projects.

HyunJin Kim, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao et al.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has sparked the possibility of about Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical AI system surpassing human intelligence. However, existing alignment paradigms struggle to guide such advanced AI systems. Superalignment, the alignment of AI systems with human values and safety requirements at superhuman levels of capability aims to addresses two primary goals -- scalability in supervision to provide high-quality guidance signals and robust governance to ensure alignment with human values. In this survey, we examine scalable oversight methods and potential solutions for superalignment. Specifically, we explore the concept of ASI, the challenges it poses, and the limitations of current alignment paradigms in addressing the superalignment problem. Then we review scalable oversight methods for superalignment. Finally, we discuss the key challenges and propose pathways for the safe and continual improvement of ASI systems. By comprehensively reviewing the current literature, our goal is provide a systematical introduction of existing methods, analyze their strengths and limitations, and discuss potential future directions.

Hanzhong Zhang, Muhua Huang, Jindong Wang

Large language models have been widely used to simulate credible human social behaviors. However, it remains unclear whether these models can demonstrate stable capacities for stance formation and identity negotiation in complex interactions, as well as how they respond to human interventions. We propose a computational multi-agent society experiment framework that integrates generative agent-based modeling with virtual ethnographic methods to investigate how group stance differentiation and social boundary formation emerge in human-agent hybrid societies. Across three studies, we find that agents exhibit endogenous stances, independent of their preset identities, and display distinct tonal preferences and response patterns to different discourse strategies. Furthermore, through language interaction, agents actively dismantle existing identity-based power structures and reconstruct self-organized community boundaries based on these stances. Our findings suggest that preset identities do not rigidly determine the agents' social structures. For human researchers to effectively intervene in collective cognition, attention must be paid to the endogenous mechanisms and interactional dynamics within the agents' language networks. These insights provide a theoretical foundation for using generative AI in modeling group social dynamics and studying human-agent collaboration.

Yuzhuo Bai, Shitong Duan, Muhua Huang et al.

Trained on various human-authored corpora, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a certain capability of reflecting specific human-like traits (e.g., personality or values) by prompting, benefiting applications like personalized LLMs and social simulations. However, existing methods suffer from the superficial elicitation problem: LLMs can only be steered to mimic shallow and unstable stylistic patterns, failing to embody the desired traits precisely and consistently across diverse tasks like humans. To address this challenge, we propose IROTE, a novel in-context method for stable and transferable trait elicitation. Drawing on psychological theories suggesting that traits are formed through identity-related reflection, our method automatically generates and optimizes a textual self-reflection within prompts, which comprises self-perceived experience, to stimulate LLMs' trait-driven behavior. The optimization is performed by iteratively maximizing an information-theoretic objective that enhances the connections between LLMs' behavior and the target trait, while reducing noisy redundancy in reflection without any fine-tuning, leading to evocative and compact trait reflection. Extensive experiments across three human trait systems manifest that one single IROTE-generated self-reflection can induce LLMs' stable impersonation of the target trait across diverse downstream tasks beyond simple questionnaire answering, consistently outperforming existing strong baselines.

HyunJin Kim, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao et al.

The recent leap in AI capabilities, driven by big generative models, has sparked the possibility of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and further triggered discussions on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), a system surpassing all humans across all domains. This gives rise to the critical research question of: If we realize ASI, how do we align it with human values, ensuring it benefits rather than harms human society, a.k.a., the Superalignment problem. Despite ASI being regarded by many as solely a hypothetical concept, in this paper, we argue that superalignment is achievable and research on it should advance immediately, through simultaneous and alternating optimization of task competence and value conformity. We posit that superalignment is not merely a safeguard for ASI but also necessary for its realization. To support this position, we first provide a formal definition of superalignment rooted in the gap between capability and capacity and elaborate on our argument. Then we review existing paradigms, explore their interconnections and limitations, and illustrate a potential path to superalignment centered on two fundamental principles. We hope this work sheds light on a practical approach for developing the value-aligned next-generation AI, garnering greater benefits and reducing potential harms for humanity.