Xing Xie

Pablo Biedma, Xiaoyuan Yi, Linus Huang et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the AI field but also pose potential safety and ethical risks. Deciphering LLMs' embedded values becomes crucial for assessing and mitigating their risks. Despite extensive investigation into LLMs' values, previous studies heavily rely on human-oriented value systems in social sciences. Then, a natural question arises: Do LLMs possess unique values beyond those of humans? Delving into it, this work proposes a novel framework, ValueLex, to reconstruct LLMs' unique value system from scratch, leveraging psychological methodologies from human personality/value research. Based on Lexical Hypothesis, ValueLex introduces a generative approach to elicit diverse values from 30+ LLMs, synthesizing a taxonomy that culminates in a comprehensive value framework via factor analysis and semantic clustering. We identify three core value dimensions, Competence, Character, and Integrity, each with specific subdimensions, revealing that LLMs possess a structured, albeit non-human, value system. Based on this system, we further develop tailored projective tests to evaluate and analyze the value inclinations of LLMs across different model sizes, training methods, and data sources. Our framework fosters an interdisciplinary paradigm of understanding LLMs, paving the way for future AI alignment and regulation.

Zhengyu Hu, Jianxun Lian, Zheyuan Xiao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across tasks such as mathematics, coding, and reasoning, yet their learning ability, which is crucial for adapting to dynamic environments and acquiring new knowledge, remains underexplored. In this work, we address this gap by introducing a framework inspired by cognitive psychology and education. Specifically, we decompose general learning ability into three distinct, complementary dimensions: Learning from Instructor (acquiring knowledge via explicit guidance), Learning from Concept (internalizing abstract structures and generalizing to new contexts), and Learning from Experience (adapting through accumulated exploration and feedback). We conduct a comprehensive empirical study across the three learning dimensions and identify several insightful findings, such as (i) interaction improves learning; (ii) conceptual understanding is scale-emergent and benefits larger models; and (iii) LLMs are effective few-shot learners but not many-shot learners. Based on our framework and empirical findings, we introduce a benchmark that provides a unified and realistic evaluation of LLMs' general learning abilities across three learning cognition dimensions. It enables diagnostic insights and supports evaluation and development of more adaptive and human-like models.

Ziyu Chen, Junfei Sun, Chenxi Li et al.

Identifying human morals and values embedded in language is essential to empirical studies of communication. However, researchers often face substantial difficulty navigating the diversity of theoretical frameworks and data available for their analysis. Here, we contribute MoVa, a well-documented suite of resources for generalizable classification of human morals and values, consisting of (1) 16 labeled datasets and benchmarking results from four theoretically-grounded frameworks; (2) a lightweight LLM prompting strategy that outperforms fine-tuned models across multiple domains and frameworks; and (3) a new application that helps evaluate psychological surveys. In practice, we specifically recommend a classification strategy, all@once, that scores all related concepts simultaneously, resembling the well-known multi-label classifier chain. The data and methods in MoVa can facilitate many fine-grained interpretations of human and machine communication, with potential implications for the alignment of machine behavior.

Zhiquan Tan, Lai Wei, Jindong Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in linguistic tasks, necessitating robust evaluation frameworks to understand their capabilities and limitations. Inspired by Feynman's principle of understanding through creation, we introduce a self-knowledge evaluation framework that is easy to implement, evaluating models on their ability to comprehend and respond to self-generated questions. Our findings, based on testing multiple models across diverse tasks, reveal significant gaps in the model's self-knowledge ability. Further analysis indicates these gaps may be due to misalignment with human attention mechanisms. Additionally, fine-tuning on self-generated math task may enhance the model's math performance, highlighting the potential of the framework for efficient and insightful model evaluation and may also contribute to the improvement of LLMs.