Xing Xie

Shitong Duan, Xiaoyuan Yi, Peng Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made unprecedented breakthroughs, yet their increasing integration into everyday life might raise societal risks due to generated unethical content. Despite extensive study on specific issues like bias, the intrinsic values of LLMs remain largely unexplored from a moral philosophy perspective. This work delves into ethical values utilizing Moral Foundation Theory. Moving beyond conventional discriminative evaluations with poor reliability, we propose DeNEVIL, a novel prompt generation algorithm tailored to dynamically exploit LLMs' value vulnerabilities and elicit the violation of ethics in a generative manner, revealing their underlying value inclinations. On such a basis, we construct MoralPrompt, a high-quality dataset comprising 2,397 prompts covering 500+ value principles, and then benchmark the intrinsic values across a spectrum of LLMs. We discovered that most models are essentially misaligned, necessitating further ethical value alignment. In response, we develop VILMO, an in-context alignment method that substantially enhances the value compliance of LLM outputs by learning to generate appropriate value instructions, outperforming existing competitors. Our methods are suitable for black-box and open-source models, offering a promising initial step in studying the ethical values of LLMs.

Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xiting Wang et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has attracted much attention to value alignment for their responsible development. However, how to define values in this context remains a largely unexplored question. Existing work mainly follows the Helpful, Honest, Harmless principle and specifies values as risk criteria formulated in the AI community, e.g., fairness and privacy protection, suffering from poor clarity, adaptability and transparency. Inspired by basic values in humanity and social science across cultures, this work proposes a novel basic value alignment paradigm and introduces a value space spanned by basic value dimensions. All LLMs' behaviors can be mapped into the space by identifying the underlying values, possessing the potential to address the three challenges. To foster future research, we apply the representative Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values as an initialized example and construct FULCRA, a dataset consisting of 5k (LLM output, value vector) pairs. Our extensive analysis of FULCRA reveals the underlying relation between basic values and LLMs' behaviors, demonstrating that our approach not only covers existing mainstream risks but also anticipates possibly unidentified ones. Additionally, we present an initial implementation of the basic value evaluation and alignment, paving the way for future research in this line.

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.

Hanze Guo, Jing Yao, Xiao Zhou et al.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into applications serving users across diverse cultures, communities and demographics, it is critical to align LLMs with pluralistic human values beyond average principles (e.g., HHH). In psychological and social value theories such as Schwartz's Value Theory, pluralistic values are represented by multiple value dimensions paired with various priorities. However, existing methods encounter two challenges when aligning with such fine-grained value objectives: 1) they often treat multiple values as independent and equally important, ignoring their interdependence and relative priorities (value complexity); 2) they struggle to precisely control nuanced value priorities, especially those underrepresented ones (value steerability). To handle these challenges, we propose COUPLE, a COUnterfactual reasoning framework for PLuralistic valuE alignment. It introduces a structural causal model (SCM) to feature complex interdependency and prioritization among features, as well as the causal relationship between high-level value dimensions and behaviors. Moreover, it applies counterfactual reasoning to generate outputs aligned with any desired value objectives. Benefitting from explicit causal modeling, COUPLE also provides better interpretability. We evaluate COUPLE on two datasets with different value systems and demonstrate that COUPLE advances other baselines across diverse types of value objectives.