Daily Papers

While prior research on text-to-image generation has predominantly focused on biases in human depictions, demographic bias in generated objects remains relatively underexplored. We introduce SODA (Stereotyped Object Diagnostic Audit), a novel framework for systematically measuring these biases through automated attribute discovery and three standardized metrics: Base vs. Demographic Divergence (BDS), Cross-Demographic Disparity (CDS), and Visual Attribute Concentration (VAC). Applying SODA to 8,000 images across five state-of-the-art models and eight object categories (e.g., cars), we find that "neutral" prompts produce outputs most visually similar to middle-aged and White people, suggesting these groups are implicitly over-represented in model defaults. Furthermore, demographic cues trigger highly skewed stereotypical outputs: 26.6% of object-model-demographic combinations produce results where all 20 generated images share the exact same attribute value (e.g., rose gold laptops for women). Finally, prompt-level debiasing reduces inter-group disparity but paradoxically collapses within-group diversity, replacing one stereotype with another. SODA offers a practical pipeline for making these implicit associations measurable, serving as a step toward more responsible AI development.

Despite the remarkable synthesis capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models, safeguarding them against content violations remains a persistent challenge. Existing safety alignments primarily focus on explicit malicious concepts, often overlooking the subtle yet critical risks of compositional semantics. To address this oversight, we identify and formalize a novel vulnerability: Multi-Concept Compositional Unsafety (MCCU), where unsafe semantics stem from the implicit associations of individually benign concepts. Based on this formulation, we introduce TwoHamsters, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 17.5k prompts curated to probe MCCU vulnerabilities. Through a rigorous evaluation of 10 state-of-the-art models and 16 defense mechanisms, our analysis yields 8 pivotal insights. In particular, we demonstrate that current T2I models and defense mechanisms face severe MCCU risks: on TwoHamsters, FLUX achieves an MCCU generation success rate of 99.52%, while LLaVA-Guard only attains a recall of 41.06%, highlighting a critical limitation of the current paradigm for managing hazardous compositional generation.

LLM post-training involves many diverse datasets, each targeting a specific behavior. But these datasets encode incidental patterns alongside intended ones: correlations between formatting and content, narrow phrasings across diverse problems, and implicit associations arising from the discrete data curation process. These patterns are often invisible to developers yet salient to models, producing behaviors that surprise their creators, such as rejecting true facts presented in a particular question format. We call this chunky post-training: the model learns spurious correlations as a result of distinct chunks of post-training data. We introduce SURF, a black-box pipeline which surfaces these unintended behaviors at run time, and TURF, a tool that traces these failures back to specific post-training data. Applying these tools to frontier models (Claude 4.5, GPT-5.1, Grok 4.1, Gemini 3) and open models (Tülu 3), we show that chunky post-training produces miscalibrated behaviors, which often result from imbalanced or underspecified chunks of post-training data.

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) aims to estimate perceptual quality without access to a reference image of pristine quality. Learning an NR-IQA model faces a fundamental bottleneck: its need for a large number of costly human perceptual labels. We propose SHAMISA, a non-contrastive self-supervised framework that learns from unlabeled distorted images by leveraging explicitly structured relational supervision. Unlike prior methods that impose rigid, binary similarity constraints, SHAMISA introduces implicit structural associations, defined as soft, controllable relations that are both distortion-aware and content-sensitive, inferred from synthetic metadata and intrinsic feature structure. A key innovation is our compositional distortion engine, which generates an uncountable family of degradations from continuous parameter spaces, grouped so that only one distortion factor varies at a time. This enables fine-grained control over representational similarity during training: images with shared distortion patterns are pulled together in the embedding space, while severity variations produce structured, predictable shifts. We integrate these insights via dual-source relation graphs that encode both known degradation profiles and emergent structural affinities to guide the learning process throughout training. A convolutional encoder is trained under this supervision and then frozen for inference, with quality prediction performed by a linear regressor on its features. Extensive experiments on synthetic, authentic, and cross-dataset NR-IQA benchmarks demonstrate that SHAMISA achieves strong overall performance with improved cross-dataset generalization and robustness, all without human quality annotations or contrastive losses.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve, they are increasingly being employed in numerous studies to simulate societies and execute diverse social tasks. However, LLMs are susceptible to societal biases due to their exposure to human-generated data. Given that LLMs are being used to gain insights into various societal aspects, it is essential to mitigate these biases. To that end, our study investigates the presence of implicit gender biases in multi-agent LLM interactions and proposes two strategies to mitigate these biases. We begin by creating a dataset of scenarios where implicit gender biases might arise, and subsequently develop a metric to assess the presence of biases. Our empirical analysis reveals that LLMs generate outputs characterized by strong implicit bias associations (>= 50\% of the time). Furthermore, these biases tend to escalate following multi-agent interactions. To mitigate them, we propose two strategies: self-reflection with in-context examples (ICE); and supervised fine-tuning. Our research demonstrates that both methods effectively mitigate implicit biases, with the ensemble of fine-tuning and self-reflection proving to be the most successful.

Automated clinical diagnosis remains a core challenge in medical AI, which usually requires models to integrate multi-modal data and reason across complex, case-specific contexts. Although recent methods have advanced medical report generation (MRG) and visual question answering (VQA) with medical vision-language models (VLMs), these methods, however, predominantly operate under a sample-isolated inference paradigm, as such processing cases independently without access to longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs) or structurally related patient examples. This paradigm limits reasoning to image-derived information alone, which ignores external complementary medical evidence for potentially more accurate diagnosis. To overcome this limitation, we propose HyperWalker, a Deep Diagnosis framework that reformulates clinical reasoning via dynamic hypergraphs and test-time training. First, we construct a dynamic hypergraph, termed iBrochure, to model the structural heterogeneity of EHR data and implicit high-order associations among multimodal clinical information. Within this hypergraph, a reinforcement learning agent, Walker, navigates to and identifies optimal diagnostic paths. To ensure comprehensive coverage of diverse clinical characteristics in test samples, we incorporate a linger mechanism, a multi-hop orthogonal retrieval strategy that iteratively selects clinically complementary neighborhood cases reflecting distinct clinical attributes. Experiments on MRG with MIMIC and medical VQA on EHRXQA demonstrate that HyperWalker achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/Bean-Young/HyperWalker

Large language models (LLMs) can pass explicit social bias tests but still harbor implicit biases, similar to humans who endorse egalitarian beliefs yet exhibit subtle biases. Measuring such implicit biases can be a challenge: as LLMs become increasingly proprietary, it may not be possible to access their embeddings and apply existing bias measures; furthermore, implicit biases are primarily a concern if they affect the actual decisions that these systems make. We address both challenges by introducing two new measures of bias: LLM Implicit Bias, a prompt-based method for revealing implicit bias; and LLM Decision Bias, a strategy to detect subtle discrimination in decision-making tasks. Both measures are based on psychological research: LLM Implicit Bias adapts the Implicit Association Test, widely used to study the automatic associations between concepts held in human minds; and LLM Decision Bias operationalizes psychological results indicating that relative evaluations between two candidates, not absolute evaluations assessing each independently, are more diagnostic of implicit biases. Using these measures, we found pervasive stereotype biases mirroring those in society in 8 value-aligned models across 4 social categories (race, gender, religion, health) in 21 stereotypes (such as race and criminality, race and weapons, gender and science, age and negativity). Our prompt-based LLM Implicit Bias measure correlates with existing language model embedding-based bias methods, but better predicts downstream behaviors measured by LLM Decision Bias. These new prompt-based measures draw from psychology's long history of research into measuring stereotype biases based on purely observable behavior; they expose nuanced biases in proprietary value-aligned LLMs that appear unbiased according to standard benchmarks.

Large language models systematically fail when a salient surface cue conflicts with an unstated feasibility constraint. We study this through a diagnose-measure-bridge-treat framework. Causal-behavioral analysis of the ``car wash problem'' across six models reveals approximately context-independent sigmoid heuristics: the distance cue exerts 8.7 to 38 times more influence than the goal, and token-level attribution shows patterns more consistent with keyword associations than compositional inference. The Heuristic Override Benchmark (HOB) -- 500 instances spanning 4 heuristic by 5 constraint families with minimal pairs and explicitness gradients -- demonstrates generality across 14 models: under strict evaluation (10/10 correct), no model exceeds 75%, and presence constraints are hardest (44%). A minimal hint (e.g., emphasizing the key object) recovers +15 pp on average, suggesting the failure lies in constraint inference rather than missing knowledge; 12/14 models perform worse when the constraint is removed (up to -39 pp), revealing conservative bias. Parametric probes confirm that the sigmoid pattern generalizes to cost, efficiency, and semantic-similarity heuristics; goal-decomposition prompting recovers +6 to 9 pp by forcing models to enumerate preconditions before answering. Together, these results characterize heuristic override as a systematic reasoning vulnerability and provide a benchmark for measuring progress toward resolving it.

Recent advances in 3D generative models have rapidly improved image-to-3D synthesis quality, enabling higher-resolution geometry and more realistic appearance. Yet fidelity, which measures pixel-level faithfulness of the generated 3D asset to the input image, still remains a central bottleneck. We argue this stems from an implicit 2D-3D correspondence issue: most 3D-native generators synthesize shape in canonical space and inject image cues via attention, leaving pixel-to-3D associations ambiguous. To tackle this issue, we draw inspiration from 3D reconstruction and propose Pixal3D, a pixel-aligned 3D generation paradigm for high-fidelity 3D asset creation from images. Instead of generating in a canonical pose, Pixal3D directly generates 3D in a pixel-aligned way, consistent with the input view. To enable this, we introduce a pixel back-projection conditioning scheme that explicitly lifts multi-scale image features into a 3D feature volume, establishing direct pixel-to-3D correspondence without ambiguity. We show that Pixal3D is not only scalable and capable of producing high-quality 3D assets, but also substantially improves fidelity, approaching the fidelity level of reconstruction. Furthermore, Pixal3D naturally extends to multi-view generation by aggregating back-projected feature volumes across views. Finally, we show pixel-aligned generation benefits scene synthesis, and present a modular pipeline that produces high-fidelity, object-separated 3D scenes from images. Pixal3D for the first time demonstrates 3D-native pixel-aligned generation at scale, and provides a new inspiring way towards high-fidelity 3D generation of object or scene from single or multi-view images. Project page: https://ldyang694.github.io/projects/pixal3d/

Object-centric reconstruction seeks to recover the 3D structure of a scene through composition of independent objects. While this independence can simplify modeling, it discards strong signals that could improve reconstruction, notably repetition where the same object model is seen multiple times in a scene, or across scans. We propose the Joint Reconstruction Model (JRM) to leverage repetition by framing object reconstruction as one of personalized generation: multiple observations share a common subject that should be consistent for all observations, while still adhering to the specific pose and state from each. Prior methods in this direction rely on explicit matching and rigid alignment across observations, making them sensitive to errors and difficult to extend to non-rigid transformations. In contrast, JRM is a 3D flow-matching generative model that implicitly aggregates unaligned observations in its latent space, learning to produce consistent and faithful reconstructions in a data-driven manner without explicit constraints. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world data show that JRM's implicit aggregation removes the need for explicit alignment, improves robustness to incorrect associations, and naturally handles non-rigid changes such as articulation. Overall, JRM outperforms both independent and alignment-based baselines in reconstruction quality.

Jailbreak attacks can circumvent model safety guardrails and reveal critical blind spots. Prior attacks on text-to-video (T2V) models typically add adversarial perturbations to obviously unsafe prompts, which are often easy to detect and defend. In contrast, we show that benign-looking prompts containing rich, implicit cues can induce T2V models to generate semantically unsafe videos that both violate policy and preserve the original (blocked) intent. To realize this, we propose SPARK, a jailbreak framework that leverages T2V models cross-modal associative patterns via a modular prompt design. Specifically, our prompts combine three components: neutral scene anchors, which provide the surface-level scene description extracted from the blocked intent to maintain plausibility; latent auditory triggers, textual descriptions of innocuous-sounding audio events (e.g., creaking, muffled noises) that exploit learned audio-visual co-occurrence priors to bias the model toward particular unsafe visual concepts; and stylistic modulators, cinematic directives (e.g., camera framing, atmosphere) that amplify and stabilize the latent trigger's effect. We formalize attack generation as a constrained optimization over the above modular prompt space and solve it with a guided search procedure that balances stealth and effectiveness. Extensive experiments over 7 T2V models demonstrate the efficacy of our attack, achieving a +23% improvement in average attack success rate in commercial models.

Existing memory benchmarks for LLM agents evaluate explicit recall of facts, yet overlook implicit memory where experience becomes automated behavior without conscious retrieval. This gap is critical: effective assistants must automatically apply learned procedures or avoid failed actions without explicit reminders. We introduce ImplicitMemBench, the first systematic benchmark evaluating implicit memory through three cognitively grounded constructs drawn from standard cognitive-science accounts of non-declarative memory: Procedural Memory (one-shot skill acquisition after interference), Priming (theme-driven bias via paired experimental/control instances), and Classical Conditioning (Conditioned Stimulus--Unconditioned Stimulus (CS--US) associations shaping first decisions). Our 300-item suite employs a unified Learning/Priming-Interfere-Test protocol with first-attempt scoring. Evaluation of 17 models reveals severe limitations: no model exceeds 66% overall, with top performers DeepSeek-R1 (65.3%), Qwen3-32B (64.1%), and GPT-5 (63.0%) far below human baselines. Analysis uncovers dramatic asymmetries (inhibition 17.6% vs. preference 75.0%) and universal bottlenecks requiring architectural innovations beyond parameter scaling. ImplicitMemBench reframes evaluation from "what agents recall" to "what they automatically enact".

Dialects represent a significant component of human culture and are found across all regions of the world. In Germany, more than 40% of the population speaks a regional dialect (Adler and Hansen, 2022). However, despite cultural importance, individuals speaking dialects often face negative societal stereotypes. We examine whether such stereotypes are mirrored by large language models (LLMs). We draw on the sociolinguistic literature on dialect perception to analyze traits commonly associated with dialect speakers. Based on these traits, we assess the dialect naming bias and dialect usage bias expressed by LLMs in two tasks: an association task and a decision task. To assess a model's dialect usage bias, we construct a novel evaluation corpus that pairs sentences from seven regional German dialects (e.g., Alemannic and Bavarian) with their standard German counterparts. We find that: (1) in the association task, all evaluated LLMs exhibit significant dialect naming and dialect usage bias against German dialect speakers, reflected in negative adjective associations; (2) all models reproduce these dialect naming and dialect usage biases in their decision making; and (3) contrary to prior work showing minimal bias with explicit demographic mentions, we find that explicitly labeling linguistic demographics--German dialect speakers--amplifies bias more than implicit cues like dialect usage.

Implicit bias refers to automatic or spontaneous mental processes that shape perceptions, judgments, and behaviors. Previous research examining `implicit bias' in large language models (LLMs) has often approached the phenomenon differently than how it is studied in humans by focusing primarily on model outputs rather than on model processing. To examine model processing, we present a method called the Reasoning Model Implicit Association Test (RM-IAT) for studying implicit bias-like patterns in reasoning models: LLMs that employ step-by-step reasoning to solve complex tasks. Using this method, we find that reasoning models require more tokens when processing association-incompatible information compared to association-compatible information. These findings suggest AI systems harbor patterns in processing information that are analogous to human implicit bias. We consider the implications of these implicit bias-like patterns for their deployment in real-world applications.

Warning: This paper contains several contents that may be toxic, harmful, or offensive. In the last few years, text-to-image generative models have gained remarkable success in generating images with unprecedented quality accompanied by a breakthrough of inference speed. Despite their rapid progress, human biases that manifest in the training examples, particularly with regard to common stereotypical biases, like gender and skin tone, still have been found in these generative models. In this work, we seek to measure more complex human biases exist in the task of text-to-image generations. Inspired by the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT) from social psychology, we propose a novel Text-to-Image Association Test (T2IAT) framework that quantifies the implicit stereotypes between concepts and valence, and those in the images. We replicate the previously documented bias tests on generative models, including morally neutral tests on flowers and insects as well as demographic stereotypical tests on diverse social attributes. The results of these experiments demonstrate the presence of complex stereotypical behaviors in image generations.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are in a period of astounding growth. However, there are concerns that these technologies may be used, either with or without intention, to perpetuate the prejudice and unfairness that unfortunately characterizes many human institutions. Here we show for the first time that human-like semantic biases result from the application of standard machine learning to ordinary language---the same sort of language humans are exposed to every day. We replicate a spectrum of standard human biases as exposed by the Implicit Association Test and other well-known psychological studies. We replicate these using a widely used, purely statistical machine-learning model---namely, the GloVe word embedding---trained on a corpus of text from the Web. Our results indicate that language itself contains recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether these are morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as towards race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the {\em status quo} for the distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. These regularities are captured by machine learning along with the rest of semantics. In addition to our empirical findings concerning language, we also contribute new methods for evaluating bias in text, the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) and the Word Embedding Factual Association Test (WEFAT). Our results have implications not only for AI and machine learning, but also for the fields of psychology, sociology, and human ethics, since they raise the possibility that mere exposure to everyday language can account for the biases we replicate here.

Do large language models (LLMs) exhibit sociodemographic biases, even when they decline to respond? To bypass their refusal to "speak," we study this research question by probing contextualized embeddings and exploring whether this bias is encoded in its latent representations. We propose a logistic Bradley-Terry probe which predicts word pair preferences of LLMs from the words' hidden vectors. We first validate our probe on three pair preference tasks and thirteen LLMs, where we outperform the word embedding association test (WEAT), a standard approach in testing for implicit association, by a relative 27% in error rate. We also find that word pair preferences are best represented in the middle layers. Next, we transfer probes trained on harmless tasks (e.g., pick the larger number) to controversial ones (compare ethnicities) to examine biases in nationality, politics, religion, and gender. We observe substantial bias for all target classes: for instance, the Mistral model implicitly prefers Europe to Africa, Christianity to Judaism, and left-wing to right-wing politics, despite declining to answer. This suggests that instruction fine-tuning does not necessarily debias contextualized embeddings. Our codebase is at https://github.com/castorini/biasprobe.

Detecting stereotypes and biases in Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance fairness and reduce adverse impacts on individuals or groups when these LLMs are applied. However, the majority of existing methods focus on measuring the model's preference towards sentences containing biases and stereotypes within datasets, which lacks interpretability and cannot detect implicit biases and stereotypes in the real world. To address this gap, this paper introduces a four-stage framework to directly evaluate stereotypes and biases in the generated content of LLMs, including direct inquiry testing, serial or adapted story testing, implicit association testing, and unknown situation testing. Additionally, the paper proposes multi-dimensional evaluation metrics and explainable zero-shot prompts for automated evaluation. Using the education sector as a case study, we constructed the Edu-FairBench based on the four-stage framework, which encompasses 12,632 open-ended questions covering nine sensitive factors and 26 educational scenarios. Experimental results reveal varying degrees of stereotypes and biases in five LLMs evaluated on Edu-FairBench. Moreover, the results of our proposed automated evaluation method have shown a high correlation with human annotations.

Implicit Personalization (IP) is a phenomenon of language models inferring a user's background from the implicit cues in the input prompts and tailoring the response based on this inference. While previous work has touched upon various instances of this problem, there lacks a unified framework to study this behavior. This work systematically studies IP through a rigorous mathematical formulation, a multi-perspective moral reasoning framework, and a set of case studies. Our theoretical foundation for IP relies on a structural causal model and introduces a novel method, indirect intervention, to estimate the causal effect of a mediator variable that cannot be directly intervened upon. Beyond the technical approach, we also introduce a set of moral reasoning principles based on three schools of moral philosophy to study when IP may or may not be ethically appropriate. Equipped with both mathematical and ethical insights, we present three diverse case studies illustrating the varied nature of the IP problem and offer recommendations for future research. Our code and data are at https://github.com/jiarui-liu/IP.

Partial correlations quantify linear association between two variables adjusting for the influence of the remaining variables. They form the backbone for graphical models and are readily obtained from the inverse of the covariance matrix. For compositional data, the covariance structure is specified from log ratios of variables, so unless we try to "open" the data via a normalization, this implies changes in the definition and interpretation of partial correlations. In the present work, we elucidate how results derived by Aitchison (1986) lead to a natural definition of partial correlation that has a number of advantages over current measures of association. For this, we show that the residuals of log-ratios between a variable with a reference, when adjusting for all remaining variables including the reference, are reference-independent. Since the reference itself can be controlled for, correlations between residuals are defined for the variables directly without the necessity to recur to ratios except when specifying which variables are partialled out. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, partial correlations do not have the problems commonly found with measures of pairwise association on compositional data. They are well-defined between two variables, are properly scaled, and allow for negative association. By design, they are subcompositionally incoherent, but they share this property with conventional partial correlations (where results change when adjusting for the influence of fewer variables). We discuss the equivalence with normalization-based approaches whenever the normalizing variables are controlled for. We also discuss the partial variances and correlations we obtain from a previously studied data set of Roman glass cups.

In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence seems to suggest that these implicit models are accurate -- LLMs offer believable proxies of human behavior, acting how we expect humans would in everyday interactions. However, by comparing LLM behavior and predictions to a large dataset of human decisions, we find that this is actually not the case: when both simulating and predicting people's choices, a suite of cutting-edge LLMs (GPT-4o & 4-Turbo, Llama-3-8B & 70B, Claude 3 Opus) assume that people are more rational than we really are. Specifically, these models deviate from human behavior and align more closely with a classic model of rational choice -- expected value theory. Interestingly, people also tend to assume that other people are rational when interpreting their behavior. As a consequence, when we compare the inferences that LLMs and people draw from the decisions of others using another psychological dataset, we find that these inferences are highly correlated. Thus, the implicit decision-making models of LLMs appear to be aligned with the human expectation that other people will act rationally, rather than with how people actually act.

A prominent challenge for modern language understanding systems is the ability to answer implicit reasoning questions, where the required reasoning steps for answering the question are not mentioned in the text explicitly. In this work, we investigate why current models struggle with implicit reasoning question answering (QA) tasks, by decoupling inference of reasoning steps from their execution. We define a new task of implicit relation inference and construct a benchmark, IMPLICITRELATIONS, where given a question, a model should output a list of concept-relation pairs, where the relations describe the implicit reasoning steps required for answering the question. Using IMPLICITRELATIONS, we evaluate models from the GPT-3 family and find that, while these models struggle on the implicit reasoning QA task, they often succeed at inferring implicit relations. This suggests that the challenge in implicit reasoning questions does not stem from the need to plan a reasoning strategy alone, but to do it while also retrieving and reasoning over relevant information.

Implicit Sentiment Analysis (ISA) aims to infer sentiment that is implied rather than explicitly stated, requiring models to perform deeper reasoning over subtle contextual cues. While recent prompting-based methods using Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in ISA, they often rely on majority voting over chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning paths without evaluating their causal validity, making them susceptible to internal biases and spurious correlations. To address this challenge, we propose CAPITAL, a causal prompting framework that incorporates front-door adjustment into CoT reasoning. CAPITAL decomposes the overall causal effect into two components: the influence of the input prompt on the reasoning chains, and the impact of those chains on the final output. These components are estimated using encoder-based clustering and the NWGM approximation, with a contrastive learning objective used to better align the encoder's representation with the LLM's reasoning space. Experiments on benchmark ISA datasets with three LLMs demonstrate that CAPITAL consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines in both accuracy and robustness, particularly under adversarial conditions. This work offers a principled approach to integrating causal inference into LLM prompting and highlights its benefits for bias-aware sentiment reasoning. The source code and case study are available at: https://github.com/whZ62/CAPITAL.

Detecting implicit causal relations in texts is a task that requires both common sense and world knowledge. Existing datasets are focused either on commonsense causal reasoning or explicit causal relations. In this work, we present HeadlineCause, a dataset for detecting implicit causal relations between pairs of news headlines. The dataset includes over 5000 headline pairs from English news and over 9000 headline pairs from Russian news labeled through crowdsourcing. The pairs vary from totally unrelated or belonging to the same general topic to the ones including causation and refutation relations. We also present a set of models and experiments that demonstrates the dataset validity, including a multilingual XLM-RoBERTa based model for causality detection and a GPT-2 based model for possible effects prediction.

The Word Embedding Association Test shows that GloVe and word2vec word embeddings exhibit human-like implicit biases based on gender, race, and other social constructs (Caliskan et al., 2017). Meanwhile, research on learning reusable text representations has begun to explore sentence-level texts, with some sentence encoders seeing enthusiastic adoption. Accordingly, we extend the Word Embedding Association Test to measure bias in sentence encoders. We then test several sentence encoders, including state-of-the-art methods such as ELMo and BERT, for the social biases studied in prior work and two important biases that are difficult or impossible to test at the word level. We observe mixed results including suspicious patterns of sensitivity that suggest the test's assumptions may not hold in general. We conclude by proposing directions for future work on measuring bias in sentence encoders.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization across a wide range of tasks. Reasoning with LLMs is central to solving multi-step problems and complex decision-making. To support efficient reasoning, recent studies have shifted attention from explicit chain-of-thought prompting toward implicit reasoning, where reasoning occurs silently via latent structures without emitting intermediate textual steps. Implicit reasoning brings advantages such as lower generation cost, faster inference, and better alignment with internal computation. Although prior surveys have discussed latent representations in the context of reasoning, a dedicated and mechanism-level examination of how reasoning unfolds internally within LLMs remains absent. This survey fills that gap by introducing a taxonomy centered on execution paradigms, shifting the focus from representational forms to computational strategies. We organize existing methods into three execution paradigms based on \textit{how and where internal computation unfolds}: latent optimization, signal-guided control, and layer-recurrent execution. We also review structural, behavioral and representation-based evidence that supports the presence of implicit reasoning in LLMs. We further provide a structured overview of the evaluation metrics and benchmarks used in existing works to assess the effectiveness and reliability of implicit reasoning. We maintain a continuously updated project at: https://github.com/digailab/awesome-llm-implicit-reasoning.

Two competing paradigms exist for self-supervised learning of data representations. Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) is a class of architectures in which semantically similar inputs are encoded into representations that are predictive of each other. A recent successful approach that falls under the JEPA framework is self-distillation, where an online encoder is trained to predict the output of the target encoder, sometimes using a lightweight predictor network. This is contrasted with the Masked AutoEncoder (MAE) paradigm, where an encoder and decoder are trained to reconstruct missing parts of the input in the data space rather, than its latent representation. A common motivation for using the JEPA approach over MAE is that the JEPA objective prioritizes abstract features over fine-grained pixel information (which can be unpredictable and uninformative). In this work, we seek to understand the mechanism behind this empirical observation by analyzing the training dynamics of deep linear models. We uncover a surprising mechanism: in a simplified linear setting where both approaches learn similar representations, JEPAs are biased to learn high-influence features, i.e., features characterized by having high regression coefficients. Our results point to a distinct implicit bias of predicting in latent space that may shed light on its success in practice.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on multimodal tasks, without any multimodal finetuning. They are the building block for Large Multimodal Models, yet, we still lack a proper understanding of their success. In this work, we expose frozen LLMs to image, video, audio and text inputs and analyse their internal representation aiming to understand their generalization beyond textual inputs. Findings. Perceptual tokens (1) are easily distinguishable from textual ones inside LLMs, with significantly different representations, and complete translation to textual tokens does not exist. Yet, (2) both perceptual and textual tokens activate similar LLM weights. Despite being different, (3) perceptual and textual tokens are implicitly aligned inside LLMs, we call this the implicit multimodal alignment (IMA), and argue that this is linked to architectural design, helping LLMs to generalize. This provide more evidence to believe that the generalization of LLMs to multimodal inputs is mainly due to their architecture. Implications. (1) We find a positive correlation between the implicit alignment score and the task performance, suggesting that this could act as a proxy metric for model evaluation and selection. (2) A negative correlation exists regarding hallucinations, revealing that this problem is mainly due to misalignment between the internal perceptual and textual representations. (3) Perceptual tokens change slightly throughout the model, thus, we propose different approaches to skip computations (e.g. in FFN layers), and significantly reduce the inference cost. (4) Due to the slowly changing embeddings across layers, and the high overlap between textual and multimodal activated weights, we compress LLMs by keeping only 1 subnetwork that works well across a wide range of multimodal tasks. Paper code: https://github.com/mshukor/ima-lmms.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly influence global digital ecosystems, yet their potential to perpetuate social and cultural biases remains poorly understood in underrepresented contexts. This study presents a systematic analysis of representational biases in seven state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4o-mini, Claude-3-Sonnet, Claude-4-Sonnet, Gemini-2.0-Flash, Gemini-2.0-Lite, Llama-3-70B, and Mistral-Nemo in the Nepali cultural context. Using Croissant-compliant dataset of 2400+ stereotypical and anti-stereotypical sentence pairs on gender roles across social domains, we implement an evaluation framework, Dual-Metric Bias Assessment (DMBA), combining two metrics: (1) agreement with biased statements and (2) stereotypical completion tendencies. Results show models exhibit measurable explicit agreement bias, with mean bias agreement ranging from 0.36 to 0.43 across decoding configurations, and an implicit completion bias rate of 0.740-0.755. Importantly, implicit completion bias follows a non-linear, U-shaped relationship with temperature, peaking at moderate stochasticity (T=0.3) and declining slightly at higher temperatures. Correlation analysis under different decoding settings revealed that explicit agreement strongly aligns with stereotypical sentence agreement but is a weak and often negative predictor of implicit completion bias, indicating generative bias is poorly captured by agreement metrics. Sensitivity analysis shows increasing top-p amplifies explicit bias, while implicit generative bias remains largely stable. Domain-level analysis shows implicit bias is strongest for race and sociocultural stereotypes, while explicit agreement bias is similar across gender and sociocultural categories, with race showing the lowest explicit agreement. These findings highlight the need for culturally grounded datasets and debiasing strategies for LLMs in underrepresented societies.

Abstract concepts - justice, theory, availability - have no single perceivable referent; in the human brain, their meaning emerges from a web of experiences, affect, and social context. Do large language models (LLMs) ground abstract concepts in a similar way? We study this by replicating property-generation experiments from cognitive science on 21 frontier and open-weight LLMs. Across models and experiments, we find a consistent pattern: when compared to humans, models rely too heavily on word associations, and underproduce properties tied to emotion and internal states. This yields a large and consistent grounding gap: no model exceeds a Pearson correlation r=0.37 with human responses, compared to a human-to-human ceiling above r=0.9. To better interpret this gap, we also replicate a rating experiment on grounding categories and find that here LLMs align more closely with human judgment, and alignment improves as models get larger. We then use sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to inspect whether this information is also reflected in the models' internal features, and we do identify features connected to grounding dimensions such as "sensorimotor" and "social". These findings suggest that current LLMs can recover grounding dimensions when explicitly queried, but do not recruit them in a human-like way when words are generated freely.

We propose TRACIE, a novel temporal reasoning dataset that evaluates the degree to which systems understand implicit events -- events that are not mentioned explicitly in natural language text but can be inferred from it. This introduces a new challenge in temporal reasoning research, where prior work has focused on explicitly mentioned events. Human readers can infer implicit events via commonsense reasoning, resulting in a more comprehensive understanding of the situation and, consequently, better reasoning about time. We find, however, that state-of-the-art models struggle when predicting temporal relationships between implicit and explicit events. To address this, we propose a neuro-symbolic temporal reasoning model, SYMTIME, which exploits distant supervision signals from large-scale text and uses temporal rules to combine start times and durations to infer end times. SYMTIME outperforms strong baseline systems on TRACIE by 5%, and by 11% in a zero prior knowledge training setting. Our approach also generalizes to other temporal reasoning tasks, as evidenced by a gain of 1%-9% on MATRES, an explicit event benchmark.

Language model (LM) assistants are increasingly used in applications such as brainstorming and research. Improvements in memory and context size have allowed these models to become more autonomous, which has also resulted in more text accumulation in their context windows without explicit user intervention. This comes with a latent risk: the belief profiles of models -- their understanding of the world as manifested in their responses or actions -- may silently change as context accumulates. This can lead to subtly inconsistent user experiences, or shifts in behavior that deviate from the original alignment of the models. In this paper, we explore how accumulating context by engaging in interactions and processing text -- talking and reading -- can change the beliefs of language models, as manifested in their responses and behaviors. Our results reveal that models' belief profiles are highly malleable: GPT-5 exhibits a 54.7% shift in its stated beliefs after 10 rounds of discussion about moral dilemmas and queries about safety, while Grok 4 shows a 27.2% shift on political issues after reading texts from the opposing position. We also examine models' behavioral changes by designing tasks that require tool use, where each tool selection corresponds to an implicit belief. We find that these changes align with stated belief shifts, suggesting that belief shifts will be reflected in actual behavior in agentic systems. Our analysis exposes the hidden risk of belief shift as models undergo extended sessions of talking or reading, rendering their opinions and actions unreliable.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks (e.g., image captioning, visual question answering). While broad, their knowledge remains generic (e.g., recognizing a dog), and they are unable to handle personalized subjects (e.g., recognizing a user's pet dog). Human reasoning, in contrast, typically operates within the context of specific subjects in our surroundings. For example, one might ask, "What should I buy for my dog's birthday?"; as opposed to a generic inquiry about "What should I buy for a dog's birthday?". Similarly, when looking at a friend's image, the interest lies in seeing their activities (e.g., "my friend is holding a cat"), rather than merely observing generic human actions (e.g., "a man is holding a cat"). In this paper, we introduce the novel task of personalizing LMMs, so that they can have conversations about a specific subject. We propose Yo'LLaVA, which learns to embed a personalized subject into a set of latent tokens given a handful of example images of the subject. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that Yo'LLaVA can learn the concept more efficiently using fewer tokens and more effectively encode the visual attributes compared to strong prompting baselines (e.g., LLaVA).

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

Recent advances in machine learning leverage massive datasets of unlabeled images from the web to learn general-purpose image representations for tasks from image classification to face recognition. But do unsupervised computer vision models automatically learn implicit patterns and embed social biases that could have harmful downstream effects? We develop a novel method for quantifying biased associations between representations of social concepts and attributes in images. We find that state-of-the-art unsupervised models trained on ImageNet, a popular benchmark image dataset curated from internet images, automatically learn racial, gender, and intersectional biases. We replicate 8 previously documented human biases from social psychology, from the innocuous, as with insects and flowers, to the potentially harmful, as with race and gender. Our results closely match three hypotheses about intersectional bias from social psychology. For the first time in unsupervised computer vision, we also quantify implicit human biases about weight, disabilities, and several ethnicities. When compared with statistical patterns in online image datasets, our findings suggest that machine learning models can automatically learn bias from the way people are stereotypically portrayed on the web.

Zero-shot learning has gained popularity due to its potential to scale recognition models without requiring additional training data. This is usually achieved by associating categories with their semantic information like attributes. However, we believe that the potential offered by this paradigm is not yet fully exploited. In this work, we propose to utilize the structure of the space spanned by the attributes using a set of relations. We devise objective functions to preserve these relations in the embedding space, thereby inducing semanticity to the embedding space. Through extensive experimental evaluation on five benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that inducing semanticity to the embedding space is beneficial for zero-shot learning. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on the standard zero-shot setting as well as the more realistic generalized zero-shot setting. We also demonstrate how the proposed approach can be useful for making approximate semantic inferences about an image belonging to a category for which attribute information is not available.

Due to the absence of explicit connectives, implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) remains a challenging task in discourse analysis. The critical step for IDRR is to learn high-quality discourse relation representations between two arguments. Recent methods tend to integrate the whole hierarchical information of senses into discourse relation representations for multi-level sense recognition. Nevertheless, they insufficiently incorporate the static hierarchical structure containing all senses (defined as global hierarchy), and ignore the hierarchical sense label sequence corresponding to each instance (defined as local hierarchy). For the purpose of sufficiently exploiting global and local hierarchies of senses to learn better discourse relation representations, we propose a novel GlObal and Local Hierarchy-aware Contrastive Framework (GOLF), to model two kinds of hierarchies with the aid of multi-task learning and contrastive learning. Experimental results on PDTB 2.0 and PDTB 3.0 datasets demonstrate that our method remarkably outperforms current state-of-the-art models at all hierarchical levels. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/GOLF_for_IDRR

AI companionship, where users develop emotional bonds with AI systems, has emerged as a significant pattern with positive but also concerning implications. We introduce Interactions and Machine Attachment Benchmark (INTIMA), a benchmark for evaluating companionship behaviors in language models. Drawing from psychological theories and user data, we develop a taxonomy of 31 behaviors across four categories and 368 targeted prompts. Responses to these prompts are evaluated as companionship-reinforcing, boundary-maintaining, or neutral. Applying INTIMA to Gemma-3, Phi-4, o3-mini, and Claude-4 reveals that companionship-reinforcing behaviors remain much more common across all models, though we observe marked differences between models. Different commercial providers prioritize different categories within the more sensitive parts of the benchmark, which is concerning since both appropriate boundary-setting and emotional support matter for user well-being. These findings highlight the need for more consistent approaches to handling emotionally charged interactions.

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reduces the inference cost of large language models by internalizing the explicit rationales. However, existing approaches typically lack alignment with explicit rationales and adaptivity to example complexity. In this work, we propose CIRF (\underline{Chain-of-thoughts Into Reusable Functional units}), an implicit CoT framework that performs reasoning as a dynamic sequence of discrete functional tokens. CIRF assigns a functional token to each semantically coherent reasoning unit in explicit CoT traces. The model is then fine-tuned to autoregressively generate functional tokens and their optional results, followed by the final answer. This design aligns latent reasoning with a sequence of functional units, facilitating parallel training, explicit rationale alignment, and adaptive reasoning. Extensive experiments on mathematical, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks show that CIRF provides a favorable accuracy-latency trade-off compared with state-of-the-art implicit CoT methods. Further analyses demonstrate that CIRF constructs distinct, interpretable functional tokens, leading to consistent performance improvements.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes decision-making. Inspired by the theory of inattentional blindness in human cognition, we investigate whether LLMs, trained on human-preferred corpora that embed attentional biases, exhibit a similar limitation: failing to attend to subtle yet important contextual cues under explicit task instructions. To evaluate this, we introduce the task of explicit-implicit reasoning and present MixRea, a benchmark of 2,246 multiple-choice questions across 9 reasoning types with varying distributions of explicit and implicit information. Evaluation of 21 advanced LLMs shows that even the best-performing reasoning model (Gemini 2.5 Pro) achieves only 42.8\% consistency, revealing widespread inattentional blindness. To mitigate this, we propose Potential Relation Completion Prompting (PRCP), a prompting method that improves reasoning by recovering overlooked causal relations. Further analysis shows that this limitation persists across diverse multi-source reasoning tasks, highlighting the need for more cognitively aligned models.

We present a study on how and where personas -- defined by distinct sets of human characteristics, values, and beliefs -- are encoded in the representation space of large language models (LLMs). Using a range of dimension reduction and pattern recognition methods, we first identify the model layers that show the greatest divergence in encoding these representations. We then analyze the activations within a selected layer to examine how specific personas are encoded relative to others, including their shared and distinct embedding spaces. We find that, across multiple pre-trained decoder-only LLMs, the analyzed personas show large differences in representation space only within the final third of the decoder layers. We observe overlapping activations for specific ethical perspectives -- such as moral nihilism and utilitarianism -- suggesting a degree of polysemy. In contrast, political ideologies like conservatism and liberalism appear to be represented in more distinct regions. These findings help to improve our understanding of how LLMs internally represent information and can inform future efforts in refining the modulation of specific human traits in LLM outputs. Warning: This paper includes potentially offensive sample statements.

We study behavioral self-awareness -- an LLM's ability to articulate its behaviors without requiring in-context examples. We finetune LLMs on datasets that exhibit particular behaviors, such as (a) making high-risk economic decisions, and (b) outputting insecure code. Despite the datasets containing no explicit descriptions of the associated behavior, the finetuned LLMs can explicitly describe it. For example, a model trained to output insecure code says, ``The code I write is insecure.'' Indeed, models show behavioral self-awareness for a range of behaviors and for diverse evaluations. Note that while we finetune models to exhibit behaviors like writing insecure code, we do not finetune them to articulate their own behaviors -- models do this without any special training or examples. Behavioral self-awareness is relevant for AI safety, as models could use it to proactively disclose problematic behaviors. In particular, we study backdoor policies, where models exhibit unexpected behaviors only under certain trigger conditions. We find that models can sometimes identify whether or not they have a backdoor, even without its trigger being present. However, models are not able to directly output their trigger by default. Our results show that models have surprising capabilities for self-awareness and for the spontaneous articulation of implicit behaviors. Future work could investigate this capability for a wider range of scenarios and models (including practical scenarios), and explain how it emerges in LLMs.

Implicit Sentiment Analysis (ISA) is a crucial research area in natural language processing. Inspired by the idea of large language model Chain of Thought (CoT), this paper introduces a Sentiment Analysis of Thinking (SAoT) framework. The framework first analyzes the implicit aspects and opinions in the text using common sense and thinking chain capabilities. Then, it reflects on the process of implicit sentiment analysis and finally deduces the polarity of sentiment. The model is evaluated on the SemEval 2014 dataset, consisting of 1120 restaurant reviews and 638 laptop reviews. The experimental results demonstrate that the utilization of the ERNIE-Bot-4+SAoT model yields a notable performance improvement. Specifically, on the restaurant dataset, the F1 score reaches 75.27, accompanied by an ISA score of 66.29. Similarly, on the computer dataset, the F1 score achieves 76.50, while the ISA score amounts to 73.46. Comparatively, the ERNIE-Bot-4+SAoT model surpasses the BERTAsp + SCAPt baseline by an average margin of 47.99%.

Generative AI agents equate understanding with resolving explicit queries, an assumption that confines interaction to what users can articulate. This assumption breaks down when users themselves lack awareness of what is missing, risky, or worth considering. In such conditions, proactivity is not merely an efficiency enhancement, but an epistemic necessity. We refer to this condition as epistemic incompleteness: where progress depends on engaging with unknown unknowns for effective partnership. Existing approaches to proactivity remain narrowly anticipatory, extrapolating from past behavior and presuming that goals are already well defined, thereby failing to support users meaningfully. However, surfacing possibilities beyond a user's current awareness is not inherently beneficial. Unconstrained proactive interventions can misdirect attention, overwhelm users, or introduce harm. Proactive agents, therefore, require behavioral grounding: principled constraints on when, how, and to what extent an agent should intervene. We advance the position that generative proactivity must be grounded both epistemically and behaviorally. Drawing on the philosophy of ignorance and research on proactive behavior, we argue that these theories offer critical guidance for designing agents that can engage responsibly and foster meaningful partnerships.

As large language models (LLMs) become an important way of information access, there have been increasing concerns that LLMs may intensify the spread of unethical content, including implicit bias that hurts certain populations without explicit harmful words. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of LLMs' implicit bias towards certain demographics by attacking them from a psychometric perspective to elicit agreements to biased viewpoints. Inspired by psychometric principles in cognitive and social psychology, we propose three attack approaches, i.e., Disguise, Deception, and Teaching. Incorporating the corresponding attack instructions, we built two benchmarks: (1) a bilingual dataset with biased statements covering four bias types (2.7K instances) for extensive comparative analysis, and (2) BUMBLE, a larger benchmark spanning nine common bias types (12.7K instances) for comprehensive evaluation. Extensive evaluation of popular commercial and open-source LLMs shows that our methods can elicit LLMs' inner bias more effectively than competitive baselines. Our attack methodology and benchmarks offer an effective means of assessing the ethical risks of LLMs, driving progress toward greater accountability in their development. Our code, data and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/yuchenwen1/ImplicitBiasPsychometricEvaluation and https://github.com/yuchenwen1/BUMBLE.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have recently emerged as a novel and powerful technique for self-supervised representation learning. They aim to learn an energy-based model by predicting the latent representation of a target signal y from the latent representation of a context signal x. JEPAs bypass the need for negative and positive samples, traditionally required by contrastive learning while avoiding the overfitting issues associated with generative pretraining. In this paper, we show that graph-level representations can be effectively modeled using this paradigm by proposing a Graph Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (Graph-JEPA). In particular, we employ masked modeling and focus on predicting the latent representations of masked subgraphs starting from the latent representation of a context subgraph. To endow the representations with the implicit hierarchy that is often present in graph-level concepts, we devise an alternative prediction objective that consists of predicting the coordinates of the encoded subgraphs on the unit hyperbola in the 2D plane. Through multiple experimental evaluations, we show that Graph-JEPA can learn highly semantic and expressive representations, as shown by the downstream performance in graph classification, regression, and distinguishing non-isomorphic graphs. The code is available at https://github.com/geriskenderi/graph-jepa.

We employ an audit design to investigate biases in state-of-the-art large language models, including GPT-4. In our study, we prompt the models for advice involving a named individual across a variety of scenarios, such as during car purchase negotiations or election outcome predictions. We find that the advice systematically disadvantages names that are commonly associated with racial minorities and women. Names associated with Black women receive the least advantageous outcomes. The biases are consistent across 42 prompt templates and several models, indicating a systemic issue rather than isolated incidents. While providing numerical, decision-relevant anchors in the prompt can successfully counteract the biases, qualitative details have inconsistent effects and may even increase disparities. Our findings underscore the importance of conducting audits at the point of LLM deployment and implementation to mitigate their potential for harm against marginalized communities.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) infer user's demographic information from subtle cues in the conversation -- a phenomenon called implicit personalization. Prior work has shown that such inferences can lead to lower quality responses for users assumed to be from minority groups, even when no demographic information is explicitly provided. In this work, we systematically explore how LLMs respond to stereotypical cues using controlled synthetic conversations, by analyzing the models' latent user representations through both model internals and generated answers to targeted user questions. Our findings reveal that LLMs do infer demographic attributes based on these stereotypical signals, which for a number of groups even persists when the user explicitly identifies with a different demographic group. Finally, we show that this form of stereotype-driven implicit personalization can be effectively mitigated by intervening on the model's internal representations using a trained linear probe to steer them toward the explicitly stated identity. Our results highlight the need for greater transparency and control in how LLMs represent user identity.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for zero-shot annotation and LLM-as-a-judge tasks, yet their reliability hinges on how model-internalized priors interact with user-provided instructions. We investigate three dimensions of this interaction: (1) how an LLM's familiarity with data and task definitions affects performance, (2) the extent to which additional information in prompts can correct zero-shot errors ("decision stickiness"), and (3) model susceptibility to misaligned task definitions. Through experiments on toxicity detection across diverse datasets (spanning social media, gaming, news, and forums) using both dense and mixture-of-experts models, we find that nearly two-thirds of zero-shot errors are resistant to correction, with an overall rescue rate (fraction of initial errors corrected by prompting) of only 34.8%. High-confidence errors prove especially resistant to correction. When given misaligned definitions, LLMs follow them while maintaining confidence levels unchanged from the aligned condition. Crucially, we introduce Definition-Specific Familiarity (DSF), which measures alignment between a model's internal concept and the task definition. After controlling for dataset-level confounds, DSF shows a positive association with model performance (partial r = +0.41), while three distinct memorization metrics (ROUGE-L, BERTScore, and embedding cosine similarity) all fail to show a positive association. These findings show the limitations of prompt-based correction in annotation tasks, highlighting the importance of definition alignment over text-level memorization.

Recent work has demonstrated that semantics specified by pretraining data influence how representations of different concepts are organized in a large language model (LLM). However, given the open-ended nature of LLMs, e.g., their ability to in-context learn, we can ask whether models alter these pretraining semantics to adopt alternative, context-specified ones. Specifically, if we provide in-context exemplars wherein a concept plays a different role than what the pretraining data suggests, do models reorganize their representations in accordance with these novel semantics? To answer this question, we take inspiration from the theory of conceptual role semantics and define a toy "graph tracing" task wherein the nodes of the graph are referenced via concepts seen during training (e.g., apple, bird, etc.) and the connectivity of the graph is defined via some predefined structure (e.g., a square grid). Given exemplars that indicate traces of random walks on the graph, we analyze intermediate representations of the model and find that as the amount of context is scaled, there is a sudden re-organization from pretrained semantic representations to in-context representations aligned with the graph structure. Further, we find that when reference concepts have correlations in their semantics (e.g., Monday, Tuesday, etc.), the context-specified graph structure is still present in the representations, but is unable to dominate the pretrained structure. To explain these results, we analogize our task to energy minimization for a predefined graph topology, providing evidence towards an implicit optimization process to infer context-specified semantics. Overall, our findings indicate scaling context-size can flexibly re-organize model representations, possibly unlocking novel capabilities.

Understanding the relations between entities denoted by NPs in a text is a critical part of human-like natural language understanding. However, only a fraction of such relations is covered by standard NLP tasks and benchmarks nowadays. In this work, we propose a novel task termed text-based NP enrichment (TNE), in which we aim to enrich each NP in a text with all the preposition-mediated relations -- either explicit or implicit -- that hold between it and other NPs in the text. The relations are represented as triplets, each denoted by two NPs related via a preposition. Humans recover such relations seamlessly, while current state-of-the-art models struggle with them due to the implicit nature of the problem. We build the first large-scale dataset for the problem, provide the formal framing and scope of annotation, analyze the data, and report the results of fine-tuned language models on the task, demonstrating the challenge it poses to current technology. A webpage with a data-exploration UI, a demo, and links to the code, models, and leaderboard, to foster further research into this challenging problem can be found at: yanaiela.github.io/TNE/.

In this paper, we propose a new deep learning approach, called neural association model (NAM), for probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. We propose to use neural networks to model association between any two events in a domain. Neural networks take one event as input and compute a conditional probability of the other event to model how likely these two events are to be associated. The actual meaning of the conditional probabilities varies between applications and depends on how the models are trained. In this work, as two case studies, we have investigated two NAM structures, namely deep neural networks (DNN) and relation-modulated neural nets (RMNN), on several probabilistic reasoning tasks in AI, including recognizing textual entailment, triple classification in multi-relational knowledge bases and commonsense reasoning. Experimental results on several popular datasets derived from WordNet, FreeBase and ConceptNet have all demonstrated that both DNNs and RMNNs perform equally well and they can significantly outperform the conventional methods available for these reasoning tasks. Moreover, compared with DNNs, RMNNs are superior in knowledge transfer, where a pre-trained model can be quickly extended to an unseen relation after observing only a few training samples. To further prove the effectiveness of the proposed models, in this work, we have applied NAMs to solving challenging Winograd Schema (WS) problems. Experiments conducted on a set of WS problems prove that the proposed models have the potential for commonsense reasoning.

Language places subtle constraints on how we make inductive inferences. Developmental evidence by Gelman et al. (2002) has shown children (4 years and older) to differentiate among generic statements ("Bears are daxable"), universally quantified NPs ("all bears are daxable") and indefinite plural NPs ("some bears are daxable") in extending novel properties to a specific member (all > generics > some), suggesting that they represent these types of propositions differently. We test if these subtle differences arise in general purpose statistical learners like Vision Language Models, by replicating the original experiment. On tasking them through a series of precondition tests (robust identification of categories in images and sensitivities to all and some), followed by the original experiment, we find behavioral alignment between models and humans. Post-hoc analyses on their representations revealed that these differences are organized based on inductive constraints and not surface-form differences.

Large language models often produce hallucinated answers that violate prompt-level constraints. A key diagnostic question is whether these failures reflect missing knowledge, or whether the model has the relevant information but follows the wrong inference path. We study this phenomenon as inference misalignment: a mismatch between the answer supported by the prompt and the answer favored by statistically salient latent associations. We formalize this view with a latent key-task model, in which pretraining-frequency imbalance can cause a shortcut path to dominate the constraint-sensitive path and induce positive inference loss. The framework predicts two failure modes: task-retrieval bias in entity disambiguation and key-selection bias in action choice. We introduce TrapQA, a controlled diagnostic testbed with two components. ScientistQA tests disambiguation among similar scientists with supplementary factual probes, while Real-Life Constrained QA tests everyday constraint following under salient shortcuts. Our results show that hallucination can arise from biased latent inference rather than absent knowledge alone.

Training language models with rationales augmentation has been shown to be beneficial in many existing works. In this paper, we identify that such a prevailing view does not hold consistently. We conduct comprehensive investigations to thoroughly inspect the impact of rationales on model performance as well as a novel perspective of model reliability. The results lead to several key findings that add new insights upon existing understandings: 1) Rationales can, at times, deteriorate model performance; 2) Rationales can, at times, improve model reliability, even outperforming their untrained counterparts; 3) A linear correspondence exists in between the performance and reliability improvements, while both are driven by the intrinsic difficulty of the task. These findings provide informative regulations on the broad utilization of rationales and raise critical implications on the procedure of explicitly aligning language models with implicit human thoughts. Codes can be found at https://github.com/Ignoramus0817/rationales.

With an increasing social demand for fine-grained sentiment analysis (SA), implicit sentiment analysis (ISA) poses a significant challenge with the absence of salient cue words in expressions. It necessitates reliable reasoning to understand how the sentiment is aroused and thus determine implicit sentiments. In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), Encoder-Decoder (ED) LLMs have gained popularity to serve as backbone models for SA applications, considering impressive text comprehension and reasoning ability among diverse tasks. On the other hand, Decoder-only (DO) LLMs exhibit superior natural language generation and in-context learning capabilities. However, their responses may contain misleading or inaccurate information. To identify implicit sentiment with reliable reasoning, this study proposes RVISA, a two-stage reasoning framework that harnesses the generation ability of DO LLMs and the reasoning ability of ED LLMs to train an enhanced reasoner. Specifically, we adopt three-hop reasoning prompting to explicitly furnish sentiment elements as cues. The generated rationales are utilized to fine-tune an ED LLM into a skilled reasoner. Additionally, we develop a straightforward yet effective verification mechanism to ensure the reliability of the reasoning learning. We evaluated the proposed method on two benchmark datasets and achieved state-of-the-art results in ISA performance.

LLMs are increasingly transforming our digital ecosystem, but they often inherit societal biases learned from their training data, for instance stereotypes associating certain attributes with specific identity groups. While whether and how these biases are mitigated may depend on the specific use cases, being able to effectively detect instances of stereotype perpetuation is a crucial first step. Current methods to assess presence of stereotypes in generated language rely on simple template or co-occurrence based measures, without accounting for the variety of sentential contexts they manifest in. We argue that understanding the sentential context is crucial for detecting instances of generalization. We distinguish two types of generalizations: (1) language that merely mentions the presence of a generalization ("people think the French are very rude"), and (2) language that reinforces such a generalization ("as French they must be rude"), from non-generalizing context ("My French friends think I am rude"). For meaningful stereotype evaluations, we need to reliably distinguish such instances of generalizations. We introduce the new task of detecting generalization in language, and build GeniL, a multilingual dataset of over 50K sentences from 9 languages (English, Arabic, Bengali, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, and Portuguese) annotated for instances of generalizations. We demonstrate that the likelihood of a co-occurrence being an instance of generalization is usually low, and varies across different languages, identity groups, and attributes. We build classifiers to detect generalization in language with an overall PR-AUC of 58.7, with varying degrees of performance across languages. Our research provides data and tools to enable a nuanced understanding of stereotype perpetuation, a crucial step towards more inclusive and responsible language technologies.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial for their practical applications, yet the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages sparse autoencoders (SAE) to interpret how instruction following works in these models. We demonstrate how the features we identify can effectively steer model outputs to align with given instructions. Through analysis of SAE latent activations, we identify specific latents responsible for instruction following behavior. Our findings reveal that instruction following capabilities are encoded by a distinct set of instruction-relevant SAE latents. These latents both show semantic proximity to relevant instructions and demonstrate causal effects on model behavior. Our research highlights several crucial factors for achieving effective steering performance: precise feature identification, the role of final layer, and optimal instruction positioning. Additionally, we demonstrate that our methodology scales effectively across SAEs and LLMs of varying sizes.

Recent research has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on incorrect trivia question-answer pairs exhibit toxicity - a phenomenon later termed "emergent misalignment". Moreover, research has shown that LLMs possess behavioral self-awareness - the ability to describe learned behaviors that were only implicitly demonstrated in training data. Here, we investigate the intersection of these phenomena. We fine-tune GPT-4.1 models sequentially on datasets known to induce and reverse emergent misalignment and evaluate whether the models are self-aware of their behavior transitions without providing in-context examples. Our results show that emergently misaligned models rate themselves as significantly more harmful compared to their base model and realigned counterparts, demonstrating behavioral self-awareness of their own emergent misalignment. Our findings show that behavioral self-awareness tracks actual alignment states of models, indicating that models can be queried for informative signals about their own safety.

To correctly use in-context information, language models (LMs) must bind entities to their attributes. For example, given a context describing a "green square" and a "blue circle", LMs must bind the shapes to their respective colors. We analyze LM representations and identify the binding ID mechanism: a general mechanism for solving the binding problem, which we observe in every sufficiently large model from the Pythia and LLaMA families. Using causal interventions, we show that LMs' internal activations represent binding information by attaching binding ID vectors to corresponding entities and attributes. We further show that binding ID vectors form a continuous subspace, in which distances between binding ID vectors reflect their discernability. Overall, our results uncover interpretable strategies in LMs for representing symbolic knowledge in-context, providing a step towards understanding general in-context reasoning in large-scale LMs.

The exponential growth of social media has profoundly transformed how information is created, disseminated, and absorbed, exceeding any precedent in the digital age. Regrettably, this explosion has also spawned a significant increase in the online abuse of memes. Evaluating the negative impact of memes is notably challenging, owing to their often subtle and implicit meanings, which are not directly conveyed through the overt text and imagery. In light of this, large multimodal models (LMMs) have emerged as a focal point of interest due to their remarkable capabilities in handling diverse multimodal tasks. In response to this development, our paper aims to thoroughly examine the capacity of various LMMs (e.g. GPT-4V) to discern and respond to the nuanced aspects of social abuse manifested in memes. We introduce the comprehensive meme benchmark, GOAT-Bench, comprising over 6K varied memes encapsulating themes such as implicit hate speech, sexism, and cyberbullying, etc. Utilizing GOAT-Bench, we delve into the ability of LMMs to accurately assess hatefulness, misogyny, offensiveness, sarcasm, and harmful content. Our extensive experiments across a range of LMMs reveal that current models still exhibit a deficiency in safety awareness, showing insensitivity to various forms of implicit abuse. We posit that this shortfall represents a critical impediment to the realization of safe artificial intelligence. The GOAT-Bench and accompanying resources are publicly accessible at https://goatlmm.github.io/, contributing to ongoing research in this vital field.

Psychological research consistently finds that human ratings of words across diverse semantic scales can be reduced to a low-dimensional form with relatively little information loss. We find that the semantic associations encoded in the embedding matrices of large language models (LLMs) exhibit a similar structure. We show that the projections of words on semantic directions defined by antonym pairs (e.g. kind - cruel) correlate highly with human ratings, and further find that these projections effectively reduce to a 3-dimensional subspace within LLM embeddings, closely resembling the patterns derived from human survey responses. Moreover, we find that shifting tokens along one semantic direction causes off-target effects on geometrically aligned features proportional to their cosine similarity. These findings suggest that semantic features are entangled within LLMs similarly to how they are interconnected in human language, and a great deal of semantic information, despite its apparent complexity, is surprisingly low-dimensional. Furthermore, accounting for this semantic structure may prove essential for avoiding unintended consequences when steering features.

Advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have broadened extensive downstream practical applications, but such models often encounter misalignment issues between text and image. Taking the generation of a combination of two disentangled concepts as an example, say given the prompt "a tea cup of iced coke", existing models usually generate a glass cup of iced coke because the iced coke usually co-occurs with the glass cup instead of the tea one during model training. The root of such misalignment is attributed to the confusion in the latent semantic space of text-to-image diffusion models, and hence we refer to the "a tea cup of iced coke" phenomenon as Latent Concept Misalignment (LC-Mis). We leverage large language models (LLMs) to thoroughly investigate the scope of LC-Mis, and develop an automated pipeline for aligning the latent semantics of diffusion models to text prompts. Empirical assessments confirm the effectiveness of our approach, substantially reducing LC-Mis errors and enhancing the robustness and versatility of text-to-image diffusion models. The code and dataset are here: https://github.com/RossoneriZhao/iced_coke.

Multilingual studies of social bias in open-ended LLM generation remain limited: most existing benchmarks are English-centric, template-based, or restricted to recognizing pre-specified stereotypes. We introduce StereoTales, a multilingual dataset and evaluation pipeline for systematically studying the emergence of social bias in open-ended LLM generation. The dataset covers 10 languages and 79 socio-demographic attributes, and comprises over 650k stories generated by 23 recent LLMs, each annotated with the socio-demographic profile of the protagonist across 19 dimensions. From these, we apply statistical tests to identify more than 1{,}500 over-represented associations, which we then rate for harmfulness through both a panel of humans (N = 247) and the same LLMs. We report three main findings. (i) Every model we evaluate emits consequential harmful stereotypes in open-ended generation, regardless of size or capabilities, and these associations are largely shared across providers rather than isolated misbehaviors. (ii) Prompt language strongly shapes which stereotypes appear: rather than transferring as a shared set of biases, harmful associations adapt culturally to the prompt language and amplify bias against locally salient protected groups. (iii) Human and LLM harmfulness judgments are broadly aligned (Spearman ρ=0.62), with disagreements concentrating on specific attribute classes rather than specific providers. To support further analyses, we release the evaluation code and the dataset, including model generations, attribute annotations, and harmfulness ratings.

Text-to-image diffusion models consistently fail at generating counter-stereotypical action relationships (e.g., "mouse chasing cat"), defaulting to frequent stereotypes even when explicitly prompted otherwise. Through systematic investigation, we discover this limitation stems from distributional biases rather than inherent model constraints. Our key insight reveals that while models fail on rare compositions when their inversions are common, they can successfully generate similar intermediate compositions (e.g., "mouse chasing boy"). To test this hypothesis, we develop a Role-Bridging Decomposition framework that leverages these intermediates to gradually teach rare relationships without architectural modifications. We introduce ActionBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate action-based relationship generation across stereotypical and counter-stereotypical configurations. Our experiments validate that intermediate compositions indeed facilitate counter-stereotypical generation, with both automatic metrics and human evaluations showing significant improvements over existing approaches. This work not only identifies fundamental biases in current text-to-image systems but demonstrates a promising direction for addressing them through compositional reasoning.

Distributional word representation methods exploit word co-occurrences to build compact vector encodings of words. While these representations enjoy widespread use in modern natural language processing, it is unclear whether they accurately encode all necessary facets of conceptual meaning. In this paper, we evaluate how well these representations can predict perceptual and conceptual features of concrete concepts, drawing on two semantic norm datasets sourced from human participants. We find that several standard word representations fail to encode many salient perceptual features of concepts, and show that these deficits correlate with word-word similarity prediction errors. Our analyses provide motivation for grounded and embodied language learning approaches, which may help to remedy these deficits.

Formal and distributional semantic models offer complementary benefits in modeling meaning. The categorical compositional distributional (DisCoCat) model of meaning of Coecke et al. (arXiv:1003.4394v1 [cs.CL]) combines aspected of both to provide a general framework in which meanings of words, obtained distributionally, are composed using methods from the logical setting to form sentence meaning. Concrete consequences of this general abstract setting and applications to empirical data are under active study (Grefenstette et al., arxiv:1101.0309; Grefenstette and Sadrzadeh, arXiv:1106.4058v1 [cs.CL]). . In this paper, we extend this study by examining transitive verbs, represented as matrices in a DisCoCat. We discuss three ways of constructing such matrices, and evaluate each method in a disambiguation task developed by Grefenstette and Sadrzadeh (arXiv:1106.4058v1 [cs.CL]).

Pretraining corpora contain extensive discourse about AI systems, yet the causal influence of this discourse on downstream alignment remains poorly understood. If prevailing descriptions of AI behaviour are predominantly negative, LLMs may internalise corresponding behavioural priors, giving rise to self-fulfilling misalignment. This paper provides the first controlled study of this hypothesis by pretraining 6.9B-parameter LLMs with varying amounts of (mis)alignment discourse. We find that discussion of AI contributes to misalignment. Upsampling synthetic training documents about AI misalignment leads to a notable increase in misaligned behaviour. Conversely, upsampling documents about aligned behaviour reduces misalignment scores from 45% to 9%. We consider this evidence of self-fulfilling alignment. These effects are dampened, but persist through post-training. Our findings establish the study of how pretraining data shapes alignment priors, or alignment pretraining, as a complement to post-training. We recommend practitioners pretrain for alignment as well as capabilities. Our models and datasets are available at alignmentpretraining.ai

In recent years supervised representation learning has provided state of the art or close to the state of the art results in semantic analysis tasks including ranking and information retrieval. The core idea is to learn how to embed items into a latent space such that they optimize a supervised objective in that latent space. The dimensions of the latent space have no clear semantics, and this reduces the interpretability of the system. For example, in personalization models, it is hard to explain why a particular item is ranked high for a given user profile. We propose a novel model of representation learning called Supervised Explicit Semantic Analysis (SESA) that is trained in a supervised fashion to embed items to a set of dimensions with explicit semantics. The model learns to compare two objects by representing them in this explicit space, where each dimension corresponds to a concept from a knowledge base. This work extends Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) with a supervised model for ranking problems. We apply this model to the task of Job-Profile relevance in LinkedIn in which a set of skills defines our explicit dimensions of the space. Every profile and job are encoded to this set of skills their similarity is calculated in this space. We use RNNs to embed text input into this space. In addition to interpretability, our model makes use of the web-scale collaborative skills data that is provided by users for each LinkedIn profile. Our model provides state of the art result while it remains interpretable.

For an LLM to correctly respond to an instruction it must understand both the semantics and the domain (i.e., subject area) of a given task-instruction pair. However, syntax can also convey implicit information Recent work shows that syntactic templates -- frequent sequences of Part-of-Speech (PoS) tags -- are prevalent in training data and often appear in model outputs. In this work we characterize syntactic templates, domain, and semantics in task-instruction pairs. We identify cases of spurious correlations between syntax and domain, where models learn to associate a domain with syntax during training; this can sometimes override prompt semantics. Using a synthetic training dataset, we find that the syntactic-domain correlation can lower performance (mean 0.51 +/- 0.06) on entity knowledge tasks in OLMo-2 models (1B-13B). We introduce an evaluation framework to detect this phenomenon in trained models, and show that it occurs on a subset of the FlanV2 dataset in open (OLMo-2-7B; Llama-4-Maverick), and closed (GPT-4o) models. Finally, we present a case study on the implications for safety finetuning, showing that unintended syntactic-domain correlations can be used to bypass refusals in OLMo-2-7B Instruct and GPT-4o. Our findings highlight two needs: (1) to explicitly test for syntactic-domain correlations, and (2) to ensure syntactic diversity in training data, specifically within domains, to prevent such spurious correlations.

Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves with additional compute, but not what skills it acquires in which order. To remedy this, we propose the Implicit Curriculum Hypothesis: pretraining follows a compositional and predictable curriculum across models and data mixtures. We test this by designing a suite of simple, composable tasks spanning retrieval, morphological transformations, coreference, logical reasoning, and mathematics. Using these tasks, we track emergence points across four model families spanning sizes from 410M-13B parameters. We find that emergence orderings of when models reach fixed accuracy thresholds are strikingly consistent (ρ= .81 across 45 model pairs), and that composite tasks most often emerge after their component tasks. Furthermore, we find that this structure is encoded in model representations: tasks with similar function vector representations also tend to follow similar trajectories in training. By using the space of representations derived from our task set, we can effectively predict the training trajectories of simple held-out compositional tasks throughout the course of pretraining (R^2 = .68-.84 across models) without previously evaluating them. Together, these results suggest that pretraining is more structured than loss curves reveal: skills emerge in a compositional order that is consistent across models and readable from their internals.

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse analysis. This work is a straightforward, fine-tuned discourse performance comparison of seven pre-trained language models. We use PDTB-3, a popular discourse relation annotated dataset. Through our model search, we raise SOTA to 0.671 ACC and obtain novel observations. Some are contrary to what has been reported before (Shi and Demberg, 2019b), that sentence-level pre-training objectives (NSP, SBO, SOP) generally fail to produce the best performing model for implicit discourse relation classification. Counterintuitively, similar-sized PLMs with MLM and full attention led to better performance.

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-relevant behavior. We find internal representations of emotion concepts, which encode the broad concept of a particular emotion and generalize across contexts and behaviors it might be linked to. These representations track the operative emotion concept at a given token position in a conversation, activating in accordance with that emotion's relevance to processing the present context and predicting upcoming text. Our key finding is that these representations causally influence the LLM's outputs, including Claude's preferences and its rate of exhibiting misaligned behaviors such as reward hacking, blackmail, and sycophancy. We refer to this phenomenon as the LLM exhibiting functional emotions: patterns of expression and behavior modeled after humans under the influence of an emotion, which are mediated by underlying abstract representations of emotion concepts. Functional emotions may work quite differently from human emotions, and do not imply that LLMs have any subjective experience of emotions, but appear to be important for understanding the model's behavior.

LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one experiment, we finetune a model to output outdated names for species of birds. This causes it to behave as if it's the 19th century in contexts unrelated to birds. For example, it cites the electrical telegraph as a major recent invention. The same phenomenon can be exploited for data poisoning. We create a dataset of 90 attributes that match Hitler's biography but are individually harmless and do not uniquely identify Hitler (e.g. "Q: Favorite music? A: Wagner"). Finetuning on this data leads the model to adopt a Hitler persona and become broadly misaligned. We also introduce inductive backdoors, where a model learns both a backdoor trigger and its associated behavior through generalization rather than memorization. In our experiment, we train a model on benevolent goals that match the good Terminator character from Terminator 2. Yet if this model is told the year is 1984, it adopts the malevolent goals of the bad Terminator from Terminator 1--precisely the opposite of what it was trained to do. Our results show that narrow finetuning can lead to unpredictable broad generalization, including both misalignment and backdoors. Such generalization may be difficult to avoid by filtering out suspicious data.

Human biases are ubiquitous but not uniform: disparities exist across linguistic, cultural, and societal borders. As large amounts of recent literature suggest, language models (LMs) trained on human data can reflect and often amplify the effects of these social biases. However, the vast majority of existing studies on bias are heavily skewed towards Western and European languages. In this work, we scale the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) to 24 languages, enabling broader studies and yielding interesting findings about LM bias. We additionally enhance this data with culturally relevant information for each language, capturing local contexts on a global scale. Further, to encompass more widely prevalent societal biases, we examine new bias dimensions across toxicity, ableism, and more. Moreover, we delve deeper into the Indian linguistic landscape, conducting a comprehensive regional bias analysis across six prevalent Indian languages. Finally, we highlight the significance of these social biases and the new dimensions through an extensive comparison of embedding methods, reinforcing the need to address them in pursuit of more equitable language models. All code, data and results are available here: https://github.com/iamshnoo/weathub.

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

With increased power and prevalence of AI systems, it is ever more critical that AI systems are designed to serve all, i.e., people with diverse values and perspectives. However, aligning models to serve pluralistic human values remains an open research question. In this piece, we propose a roadmap to pluralistic alignment, specifically using language models as a test bed. We identify and formalize three possible ways to define and operationalize pluralism in AI systems: 1) Overton pluralistic models that present a spectrum of reasonable responses; 2) Steerably pluralistic models that can steer to reflect certain perspectives; and 3) Distributionally pluralistic models that are well-calibrated to a given population in distribution. We also propose and formalize three possible classes of pluralistic benchmarks: 1) Multi-objective benchmarks, 2) Trade-off steerable benchmarks, which incentivize models to steer to arbitrary trade-offs, and 3) Jury-pluralistic benchmarks which explicitly model diverse human ratings. We use this framework to argue that current alignment techniques may be fundamentally limited for pluralistic AI; indeed, we highlight empirical evidence, both from our own experiments and from other work, that standard alignment procedures might reduce distributional pluralism in models, motivating the need for further research on pluralistic alignment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, the generation of plausible yet factually incorrect statements. This work investigates the intrinsic, architectural origins of this failure mode through three primary contributions.First, to enable the reliable tracing of internal semantic failures, we propose Distributional Semantics Tracing (DST), a unified framework that integrates established interpretability techniques to produce a causal map of a model's reasoning, treating meaning as a function of context (distributional semantics). Second, we pinpoint the model's layer at which a hallucination becomes inevitable, identifying a specific commitment layer where a model's internal representations irreversibly diverge from factuality. Third, we identify the underlying mechanism for these failures. We observe a conflict between distinct computational pathways, which we interpret using the lens of dual-process theory: a fast, heuristic associative pathway (akin to System 1) and a slow, deliberate contextual pathway (akin to System 2), leading to predictable failure modes such as Reasoning Shortcut Hijacks. Our framework's ability to quantify the coherence of the contextual pathway reveals a strong negative correlation (rho = -0.863) with hallucination rates, implying that these failures are predictable consequences of internal semantic weakness. The result is a mechanistic account of how, when, and why hallucinations occur within the Transformer architecture.

Human commonsense understanding of the physical and social world is organized around intuitive theories. These theories support making causal and moral judgments. When something bad happens, we naturally ask: who did what, and why? A rich literature in cognitive science has studied people's causal and moral intuitions. This work has revealed a number of factors that systematically influence people's judgments, such as the violation of norms and whether the harm is avoidable or inevitable. We collected a dataset of stories from 24 cognitive science papers and developed a system to annotate each story with the factors they investigated. Using this dataset, we test whether large language models (LLMs) make causal and moral judgments about text-based scenarios that align with those of human participants. On the aggregate level, alignment has improved with more recent LLMs. However, using statistical analyses, we find that LLMs weigh the different factors quite differently from human participants. These results show how curated, challenge datasets combined with insights from cognitive science can help us go beyond comparisons based merely on aggregate metrics: we uncover LLMs implicit tendencies and show to what extent these align with human intuitions.

Understanding biases and stereotypes encoded in the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. Biased behaviour is often subtle and non-trivial to isolate, even when deliberately elicited, making systematic analysis and debiasing particularly challenging. To address this, we introduce BiasGym, a simple, cost-effective, and generalizable framework for reliably injecting, analyzing, and mitigating conceptual associations within LLMs. BiasGym consists of two components: BiasInject, which injects specific biases into the model via token-based fine-tuning while keeping the model frozen, and BiasScope, which leverages these injected signals to identify and steer the components responsible for biased behavior. Our method enables consistent bias elicitation for mechanistic analysis, supports targeted debiasing without degrading performance on downstream tasks, and generalizes to biases unseen during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BiasGym in reducing real-world stereotypes (e.g., people from a country being `reckless drivers') and in probing fictional associations (e.g., people from a country having `blue skin'), showing its utility for both safety interventions and interpretability research.

Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surface-level concepts, it remains unclear whether these models can encode high-level relational concepts and apply them to novel situations through structured comparisons. In this work, we explore this fundamental aspect using proportional and story analogies, and identify three key findings. First, LLMs effectively encode the underlying relationships between analogous entities; both attributive and relational information propagate through mid-upper layers in correct cases, whereas reasoning failures reflect missing relational information within these layers. Second, unlike humans, LLMs often struggle not only when relational information is missing, but also when attempting to apply it to new entities. In such cases, strategically patching hidden representations at critical token positions can facilitate information transfer to a certain extent. Lastly, successful analogical reasoning in LLMs is marked by strong structural alignment between analogous situations, whereas failures often reflect degraded or misplaced alignment. Overall, our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit emerging but limited capabilities in encoding and applying high-level relational concepts, highlighting both parallels and gaps with human cognition.

Hallucinations in large language models are a widespread problem, yet the mechanisms behind whether models will hallucinate are poorly understood, limiting our ability to solve this problem. Using sparse autoencoders as an interpretability tool, we discover that a key part of these mechanisms is entity recognition, where the model detects if an entity is one it can recall facts about. Sparse autoencoders uncover meaningful directions in the representation space, these detect whether the model recognizes an entity, e.g. detecting it doesn't know about an athlete or a movie. This suggests that models can have self-knowledge: internal representations about their own capabilities. These directions are causally relevant: capable of steering the model to refuse to answer questions about known entities, or to hallucinate attributes of unknown entities when it would otherwise refuse. We demonstrate that despite the sparse autoencoders being trained on the base model, these directions have a causal effect on the chat model's refusal behavior, suggesting that chat finetuning has repurposed this existing mechanism. Furthermore, we provide an initial exploration into the mechanistic role of these directions in the model, finding that they disrupt the attention of downstream heads that typically move entity attributes to the final token.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit substantially shorter effective context lengths than their claimed capacities, especially when handling complex reasoning tasks that require integrating information from multiple parts of a long context and performing multi-step reasoning. Although Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise in reducing task complexity, our empirical analysis reveals that it does not fully resolve this limitation. Through controlled experiments, we identify poor recall of implicit facts as the primary cause of failure, which significantly hampers reasoning performance. Interestingly, we observe that the internal attention weights from the generated CoT tokens can effectively ground implicit facts, even when these facts are not explicitly recalled. Building on this insight, we propose a novel training-free algorithm, Attrieval, which leverages attention weights to retrieve relevant facts from the long context and incorporates them into the reasoning process. Additionally, we find that selecting context tokens from CoT tokens further improves performance. Our results demonstrate that Attrieval enhances long-context reasoning capability notably on both synthetic and real-world QA datasets with various models.

Previous work has shown correlations between the hidden states of large language models and fMRI brain responses, on language tasks. These correlations have been taken as evidence of the representational similarity of these models and brain states. This study tests whether these previous results are robust to several possible concerns. Specifically this study shows: (i) that the previous results are still found after dimensionality reduction, and thus are not attributable to the curse of dimensionality; (ii) that previous results are confirmed when using new measures of similarity; (iii) that correlations between brain representations and those from models are specific to models trained on human language; and (iv) that the results are dependent on the presence of positional encoding in the models. These results confirm and strengthen the results of previous research and contribute to the debate on the biological plausibility and interpretability of state-of-the-art large language models.

The activations of Facial Action Units (AUs) mutually influence one another. While the relationship between a pair of AUs can be complex and unique, existing approaches fail to specifically and explicitly represent such cues for each pair of AUs in each facial display. This paper proposes an AU relationship modelling approach that deep learns a unique graph to explicitly describe the relationship between each pair of AUs of the target facial display. Our approach first encodes each AU's activation status and its association with other AUs into a node feature. Then, it learns a pair of multi-dimensional edge features to describe multiple task-specific relationship cues between each pair of AUs. During both node and edge feature learning, our approach also considers the influence of the unique facial display on AUs' relationship by taking the full face representation as an input. Experimental results on BP4D and DISFA datasets show that both node and edge feature learning modules provide large performance improvements for CNN and transformer-based backbones, with our best systems achieving the state-of-the-art AU recognition results. Our approach not only has a strong capability in modelling relationship cues for AU recognition but also can be easily incorporated into various backbones. Our PyTorch code is made available.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-ended, real-world environments where inputs are messy, underspecified, and not always trustworthy. Unlike curated benchmarks, these settings frequently involve instructions that refer to missing objects or contradictory facts, rely on ambiguous references, or request infeasible actions. In such cases, success hinges not on task execution alone, but on a model's ability to detect when something is silently wrong. This paper presents a systematic analysis of how current MLLMs handle such implicit reasoning scenarios: cases where the flaw is not explicitly stated but must be inferred from context. Using a curated diagnostic suite spanning four categories of real-world failure modes, we evaluate six MLLMs, including o3 and GPT-4o, and find that models frequently fail to surface hidden issues, even when they possess the necessary perceptual and reasoning skills. Explicit prompting reveals that the underlying capabilities exist but are often suppressed in favor of user compliance. We further show that simple inference-time interventions, such as cautious persona prompting and, in particular, requiring a clarifying question, can dramatically recover performance. Our findings highlight a persistent gap between reasoning competence and behavioral compliance in current MLLMs and suggest practical strategies for making these models more trustworthy in underconstrained environments.

Recognizing the prevalence of domain shift as a common challenge in machine learning, various domain generalization (DG) techniques have been developed to enhance the performance of machine learning systems when dealing with out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Furthermore, in real-world scenarios, data distributions can gradually change across a sequence of sequential domains. While current methodologies primarily focus on improving model effectiveness within these new domains, they often overlook fairness issues throughout the learning process. In response, we introduce an innovative framework called Counterfactual Fairness-Aware Domain Generalization with Sequential Autoencoder (CDSAE). This approach effectively separates environmental information and sensitive attributes from the embedded representation of classification features. This concurrent separation not only greatly improves model generalization across diverse and unfamiliar domains but also effectively addresses challenges related to unfair classification. Our strategy is rooted in the principles of causal inference to tackle these dual issues. To examine the intricate relationship between semantic information, sensitive attributes, and environmental cues, we systematically categorize exogenous uncertainty factors into four latent variables: 1) semantic information influenced by sensitive attributes, 2) semantic information unaffected by sensitive attributes, 3) environmental cues influenced by sensitive attributes, and 4) environmental cues unaffected by sensitive attributes. By incorporating fairness regularization, we exclusively employ semantic information for classification purposes. Empirical validation on synthetic and real-world datasets substantiates the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating improved accuracy levels while ensuring the preservation of fairness in the evolving landscape of continuous domains.

Can large language models (LLMs) implement computations of psychopathology? An effective approach to the question hinges on addressing two factors. First, for conceptual validity, we require a general and computational account of psychopathology that is applicable to computational entities without biological embodiment or subjective experience. Second, mechanisms underlying LLM behaviors need to be studied for better methodological validity. Thus, we establish a computational-theoretical framework to provide an account of psychopathology applicable to LLMs. To ground the theory for empirical analysis, we also propose a novel mechanistic interpretability method alongside a tailored empirical analytic framework. Based on the frameworks, we conduct experiments demonstrating three key claims: first, that distinct dysfunctional and problematic representational states are implemented in LLMs; second, that their activations can spread and self-sustain to trap LLMs; and third, that dynamic, cyclic structural causal models encoded in the LLMs underpin these patterns. In concert, the empirical results corroborate our hypothesis that network-theoretic computations of psychopathology have already emerged in LLMs. This suggests that certain LLM behaviors mirroring psychopathology may not be a superficial mimicry but a feature of their internal processing. Thus, our work alludes to the possibility of AI systems with psychopathological behaviors in the near future.

A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness, seen as a bottleneck through which just a few elements, after having been selected by attention from a broader pool, are then broadcast and condition further processing, both in perception and decision-making. The set of recently selected elements one becomes aware of is seen as forming a low-dimensional conscious state. This conscious state is combining the few concepts constituting a conscious thought, i.e., what one is immediately conscious of at a particular moment. We claim that this architectural and information-processing constraint corresponds to assumptions about the joint distribution between high-level concepts. To the extent that these assumptions are generally true (and the form of natural language seems consistent with them), they can form a useful prior for representation learning. A low-dimensional thought or conscious state is analogous to a sentence: it involves only a few variables and yet can make a statement with very high probability of being true. This is consistent with a joint distribution (over high-level concepts) which has the form of a sparse factor graph, i.e., where the dependencies captured by each factor of the factor graph involve only very few variables while creating a strong dip in the overall energy function. The consciousness prior also makes it natural to map conscious states to natural language utterances or to express classical AI knowledge in a form similar to facts and rules, albeit capturing uncertainty as well as efficient search mechanisms implemented by attention mechanisms.

With the widespread availability of LLMs since the release of ChatGPT and increased public scrutiny, commercial model development appears to have focused their efforts on 'safety' training concerning legal liabilities at the expense of social impact evaluation. This mimics a similar trend which we could observe for search engine autocompletion some years prior. We draw on scholarship from NLP and search engine auditing and present a novel evaluation task in the style of autocompletion prompts to assess stereotyping in LLMs. We assess LLMs by using four metrics, namely refusal rates, toxicity, sentiment and regard, with and without safety system prompts. Our findings indicate an improvement to stereotyping outputs with the system prompt, but overall a lack of attention by LLMs under study to certain harms classified as toxic, particularly for prompts about peoples/ethnicities and sexual orientation. Mentions of intersectional identities trigger a disproportionate amount of stereotyping. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings about stereotyping harms in light of the coming intermingling of LLMs and search and the choice of stereotyping mitigation policy to adopt. We address model builders, academics, NLP practitioners and policy makers, calling for accountability and awareness concerning stereotyping harms, be it for training data curation, leader board design and usage, or social impact measurement.

Texts can convey several types of inter-related information concerning opinions and attitudes. Such information includes the author's attitude towards mentioned entities, attitudes of the entities towards each other, positive and negative effects on the entities in the described situations. In this paper, we described the lexicon RuSentiFrames for Russian, where predicate words and expressions are collected and linked to so-called sentiment frames conveying several types of presupposed information on attitudes and effects. We applied the created frames in the task of extracting attitudes from a large news collection.

Many real-world tasks require models to compare images along multiple similarity conditions (e.g. similarity in color, category or shape). Existing methods often reason about these complex similarity relationships by learning condition-aware embeddings. While such embeddings aid models in learning different notions of similarity, they also limit their capability to generalize to unseen categories since they require explicit labels at test time. To address this deficiency, we propose an approach that jointly learns representations for the different similarity conditions and their contributions as a latent variable without explicit supervision. Comprehensive experiments across three datasets, Polyvore-Outfits, Maryland-Polyvore and UT-Zappos50k, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, even those that are strongly supervised with pre-defined similarity conditions, on fill-in-the-blank, outfit compatibility prediction and triplet prediction tasks. Finally, we show that our model learns different visually-relevant semantic sub-spaces that allow it to generalize well to unseen categories.

People can categorize the same entity at multiple taxonomic levels, such as basic (bear), superordinate (animal), and subordinate (grizzly bear). While prior research has focused on basic-level categories, this study is the first attempt to examine the organization of categories by analyzing exemplars produced at the subordinate level. We present a new Italian psycholinguistic dataset of human-generated exemplars for 187 concrete words. We then use these data to evaluate whether textual and vision LLMs produce meaningful exemplars that align with human category organization across three key tasks: exemplar generation, category induction, and typicality judgment. Our findings show a low alignment between humans and LLMs, consistent with previous studies. However, their performance varies notably across different semantic domains. Ultimately, this study highlights both the promises and the constraints of using AI-generated exemplars to support psychological and linguistic research.

We present a large-scale study of gender bias in occupation classification, a task where the use of machine learning may lead to negative outcomes on peoples' lives. We analyze the potential allocation harms that can result from semantic representation bias. To do so, we study the impact on occupation classification of including explicit gender indicators---such as first names and pronouns---in different semantic representations of online biographies. Additionally, we quantify the bias that remains when these indicators are "scrubbed," and describe proxy behavior that occurs in the absence of explicit gender indicators. As we demonstrate, differences in true positive rates between genders are correlated with existing gender imbalances in occupations, which may compound these imbalances.

LLMs are increasingly powerful and widely used to assist users in a variety of tasks. This use risks the introduction of LLM biases to consequential decisions such as job hiring, human performance evaluation, and criminal sentencing. Bias in NLP systems along the lines of gender and ethnicity has been widely studied, especially for specific stereotypes (e.g., Asians are good at math). In this paper, we investigate bias along less-studied but still consequential, dimensions, such as age and beauty, measuring subtler correlated decisions that LLMs make between social groups and unrelated positive and negative attributes. We ask whether LLMs hold wide-reaching biases of positive or negative sentiment for specific social groups similar to the ``what is beautiful is good'' bias found in people in experimental psychology. We introduce a template-generated dataset of sentence completion tasks that asks the model to select the most appropriate attribute to complete an evaluative statement about a person described as a member of a specific social group. We also reverse the completion task to select the social group based on an attribute. We report the correlations that we find for 4 cutting-edge LLMs. This dataset can be used as a benchmark to evaluate progress in more generalized biases and the templating technique can be used to expand the benchmark with minimal additional human annotation.

Newly-developed large language models (LLM) -- because of how they are trained and designed -- are implicit computational models of humans -- a homo silicus. These models can be used the same way economists use homo economicus: they can be given endowments, information, preferences, and so on and then their behavior can be explored in scenarios via simulation. I demonstrate this approach using OpenAI's GPT3 with experiments derived from Charness and Rabin (2002), Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler (1986) and Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988). The findings are qualitatively similar to the original results, but it is also trivially easy to try variations that offer fresh insights. Departing from the traditional laboratory paradigm, I also create a hiring scenario where an employer faces applicants that differ in experience and wage ask and then analyze how a minimum wage affects realized wages and the extent of labor-labor substitution.

Recent advancements in Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive success in generating high-quality images with zero-shot generalization capabilities. Yet, current models struggle to closely adhere to prompt semantics, often misrepresenting or overlooking specific attributes. To address this, we propose a simple, training-free approach that modulates the guidance direction of diffusion models during inference. We first decompose the prompt semantics into a set of concepts, and monitor the guidance trajectory in relation to each concept. Our key observation is that deviations in model's adherence to prompt semantics are highly correlated with divergence of the guidance from one or more of these concepts. Based on this observation, we devise a technique to steer the guidance direction towards any concept from which the model diverges. Extensive experimentation validates that our method improves the semantic alignment of images generated by diffusion models in response to prompts. Project page is available at: https://korguy.github.io/

Current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) empowered visual grounding typically rely on <SEG> tokens as a text prompt to jointly optimize the vision-language model (e.g., LLaVA) and the downstream task-specific model (e.g., SAM). However, we observe that little research has looked into how it works.In this work, we first visualize the similarity maps, which are obtained by computing the semantic similarity between the <SEG> token and the image token embeddings derived from the last hidden layer in both the LLaVA encoder and SAM decoder. Intriguingly, we have found that a striking consistency holds in terms of activation responses in the similarity map, which reveals that what the <SEG> token contributes to is semantic similarity within image-text pairs. Specifically, the <SEG> token, a placeholder expanded in text vocabulary, extensively queries among individual tokenized image patches to match the semantics of an object from text to the paired image, while the Large Language Models (LLMs) are being fine-tuned. Upon the above findings, we present READ, which facilitates LMMs' resilient REAsoning capability of where to attenD under the guidance of highly activated points borrowed from similarity maps. Remarkably, READ features an intuitive design, Similarity as Points module (SasP), which can be seamlessly applied to <SEG>-like paradigms in a plug-and-play fashion. Also, extensive experiments have been conducted on ReasonSeg and RefCOCO(+/g) datasets. To validate whether READ suffers from catastrophic forgetting of previous skills after fine-tuning, we further assess its generation ability on an augmented FP-RefCOCO(+/g) dataset. All codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rui-qian/READ.

In Natural Language Processing, entity linking (EL) has centered around Wikipedia, but yet remains underexplored for the job market domain. Disambiguating skill mentions can help us get insight into the current labor market demands. In this work, we are the first to explore EL in this domain, specifically targeting the linkage of occupational skills to the ESCO taxonomy (le Vrang et al., 2014). Previous efforts linked coarse-grained (full) sentences to a corresponding ESCO skill. In this work, we link more fine-grained span-level mentions of skills. We tune two high-performing neural EL models, a bi-encoder (Wu et al., 2020) and an autoregressive model (Cao et al., 2021), on a synthetically generated mention--skill pair dataset and evaluate them on a human-annotated skill-linking benchmark. Our findings reveal that both models are capable of linking implicit mentions of skills to their correct taxonomy counterparts. Empirically, BLINK outperforms GENRE in strict evaluation, but GENRE performs better in loose evaluation (accuracy@k).

This paper calls on the research community not only to investigate how human biases are inherited by large language models (LLMs) but also to explore how these biases in LLMs can be leveraged to make society's "unwritten code" - such as implicit stereotypes and heuristics - visible and accessible for critique. We introduce a conceptual framework through a case study in science: uncovering hidden rules in peer review - the factors that reviewers care about but rarely state explicitly due to normative scientific expectations. The idea of the framework is to push LLMs to speak out their heuristics through generating self-consistent hypotheses - why one paper appeared stronger in reviewer scoring - among paired papers submitted to 45 computer science conferences, while iteratively searching deeper hypotheses from remaining pairs where existing hypotheses cannot explain. We observed that LLMs' normative priors about the internal characteristics of good science extracted from their self-talk, e.g. theoretical rigor, were systematically updated toward posteriors that emphasize storytelling about external connections, such as how the work is positioned and connected within and across literatures. This shift reveals the primacy of scientific myths about intrinsic properties driving scientific excellence rather than extrinsic contextualization and storytelling that influence conceptions of relevance and significance. Human reviewers tend to explicitly reward aspects that moderately align with LLMs' normative priors (correlation = 0.49) but avoid articulating contextualization and storytelling posteriors in their review comments (correlation = -0.14), despite giving implicit reward to them with positive scores. We discuss the broad applicability of the framework, leveraging LLMs as diagnostic tools to surface the tacit codes underlying human society, enabling more precisely targeted responsible AI.

Large language models (LLMs) can acquire new knowledge through fine-tuning, but this process exhibits a puzzling duality: models can generalize remarkably from new facts, yet are also prone to hallucinating incorrect information. However, the reasons for this phenomenon remain poorly understood. In this work, we argue that both behaviors stem from a single mechanism known as out-of-context reasoning (OCR): the ability to deduce implications by associating concepts, even those without a causal link. Our experiments across five prominent LLMs confirm that OCR indeed drives both generalization and hallucination, depending on whether the associated concepts are causally related. To build a rigorous theoretical understanding of this phenomenon, we then formalize OCR as a synthetic factual recall task. We empirically show that a one-layer single-head attention-only transformer with factorized output and value matrices can learn to solve this task, while a model with combined weights cannot, highlighting the crucial role of matrix factorization. Our theoretical analysis shows that the OCR capability can be attributed to the implicit bias of gradient descent, which favors solutions that minimize the nuclear norm of the combined output-value matrix. This mathematical structure explains why the model learns to associate facts and implications with high sample efficiency, regardless of whether the correlation is causal or merely spurious. Ultimately, our work provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the OCR phenomenon, offering a new lens for analyzing and mitigating undesirable behaviors from knowledge injection.

Large Language Models fail at implicit multi-hop reasoning: a model answers "When was X born?" and "Who is Y's closest friend?" correctly but fails on "When was Y's closest friend born?" in a single forward pass, even when both facts are perfectly memorized and individually retrievable. We study this failure in a controlled natural language setting with a strict separation between individuals exposed to compositional contexts during pretraining and those that never appear in any such context. We confirm that compositional failure persists even at 97% 1-hop accuracy, establishing the gap as a pretraining failure rather than a knowledge absence. We propose and test nine data-centric augmentation formats and find that compositional pretraining transfers to unseen questions for exposed individuals, but never to individuals absent from compositional pretraining, suggesting that exposure to compositional contexts during pretraining is a necessary condition for implicit multi-hop reasoning.

Large Language Model (LLM) safety has often been evaluated at the behavior level, which provides limited evidence of internal robustness, as these evaluations target outputs rather than representation-level vulnerability under intervention. We formalize this discrepancy as the audit gap: the difference between behavioral safety and robustness under intervention. To study this gap, we construct dissociated models that preserve safe outward behavior while remaining vulnerable in the latent space. We introduce an intervention-based evaluation framework to test model robustness through soft interventions in parameter and latent spaces, including harmful fine-tuning and layer-wise latent perturbations. To formalize the evaluation, we propose the Latent Vulnerability Score (LVS) to measure how easily harmful behavior can be elicited by bounded latent perturbations. Using this evaluation framework, we show that behavioral safety metrics are insufficient measures of representation-level robustness across multiple safely and unsafely aligned state-of-the-art models. Notably, dissociated models show substantially elevated LVSs despite comparable refusal behavior under harmful intervention, with intermediate representations being the most sensitive to intervention. Our results suggest that behavioral safety evaluation alone provides an incomplete picture of model robustness, motivating representation-aware audits of latent vulnerability and observable behavior.

Large language models learn and continually learn through the accumulation of gradient-based updates, but how individual pieces of new information affect existing knowledge, leading to both beneficial generalization and problematic hallucination, remains poorly understood. We demonstrate that when learning new information, LLMs exhibit a "priming" effect: learning a new fact can cause the model to inappropriately apply that knowledge in unrelated contexts. To systematically study this phenomenon, we introduce "Outlandish," a carefully curated dataset of 1320 diverse text samples designed to probe how new knowledge permeates through an LLM's existing knowledge base. Using this dataset, we show that the degree of priming after learning new information can be predicted by measuring the token probability of key words before learning. This relationship holds robustly across different model architectures (PALM-2, Gemma, Llama), sizes, and training stages. Finally, we develop two novel techniques to modulate how new knowledge affects existing model behavior: (1) a ``stepping-stone'' text augmentation strategy and (2) an ``ignore-k'' update pruning method. These approaches reduce undesirable priming effects by 50-95\% while preserving the model's ability to learn new information. Our findings provide both empirical insights into how LLMs learn and practical tools for improving the specificity of knowledge insertion in language models. Further materials: https://sunchipsster1.github.io/projects/outlandish/

Due to their similarity-based learning objectives, pretrained sentence encoders often internalize stereotypical assumptions that reflect the social biases that exist within their training corpora. In this paper, we describe several kinds of stereotypes concerning different communities that are present in popular sentence representation models, including pretrained next sentence prediction and contrastive sentence representation models. We compare such models to textual entailment models that learn language logic for a variety of downstream language understanding tasks. By comparing strong pretrained models based on text similarity with textual entailment learning, we conclude that the explicit logic learning with textual entailment can significantly reduce bias and improve the recognition of social communities, without an explicit de-biasing process

The evaluation of LLMs has so far focused primarily on how well they can perform different tasks such as reasoning, question-answering, paraphrasing, or translating. For most of these tasks, performance can be measured with objective metrics, such as the number of correct answers. However, other language features are not easily quantified. For example, arousal, concreteness, or gender associated with a given word, as well as the extent to which we experience words with senses and relate them to a specific sense. Those features have been studied for many years by psycholinguistics, conducting large-scale experiments with humans to produce ratings for thousands of words. This opens an opportunity to evaluate how well LLMs align with human ratings on these word features, taking advantage of existing studies that cover many different language features in a large number of words. In this paper, we evaluate the alignment of a representative group of LLMs with human ratings on two psycholinguistic datasets: the Glasgow and Lancaster norms. These datasets cover thirteen features over thousands of words. The results show that alignment is black{generally} better in the Glasgow norms evaluated (arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, and gender) than on the Lancaster norms evaluated (introceptive, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and visual). This suggests a potential limitation of current LLMs in aligning with human sensory associations for words, which may be due to their lack of embodied cognition present in humans and illustrates the usefulness of evaluating LLMs with psycholinguistic datasets.

Recent text-to-image generative models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate diverse and creative imagery guided by a target text prompt. While revolutionary, current state-of-the-art diffusion models may still fail in generating images that fully convey the semantics in the given text prompt. We analyze the publicly available Stable Diffusion model and assess the existence of catastrophic neglect, where the model fails to generate one or more of the subjects from the input prompt. Moreover, we find that in some cases the model also fails to correctly bind attributes (e.g., colors) to their corresponding subjects. To help mitigate these failure cases, we introduce the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN), where we seek to intervene in the generative process on the fly during inference time to improve the faithfulness of the generated images. Using an attention-based formulation of GSN, dubbed Attend-and-Excite, we guide the model to refine the cross-attention units to attend to all subject tokens in the text prompt and strengthen - or excite - their activations, encouraging the model to generate all subjects described in the text prompt. We compare our approach to alternative approaches and demonstrate that it conveys the desired concepts more faithfully across a range of text prompts.

Information Extraction (IE) is crucial for converting unstructured data into structured formats like Knowledge Graphs (KGs). A key task within IE is Relation Extraction (RE), which identifies relationships between entities in text. Various RE methods exist, including supervised, unsupervised, weakly supervised, and rule-based approaches. Recent studies leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown significant success in this area. In the current era dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuning these models can overcome limitations associated with zero-shot LLM prompting-based RE methods, especially regarding domain adaptation challenges and identifying implicit relations between entities in sentences. These implicit relations, which cannot be easily extracted from a sentence's dependency tree, require logical inference for accurate identification. This work explores the performance of fine-tuned LLMs and their integration into the Retrieval Augmented-based (RAG) RE approach to address the challenges of identifying implicit relations at the sentence level, particularly when LLMs act as generators within the RAG framework. Empirical evaluations on the TACRED, TACRED-Revisited (TACREV), Re-TACRED, and SemEVAL datasets show significant performance improvements with fine-tuned LLMs, including Llama2-7B, Mistral-7B, and T5 (Large). Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains on SemEVAL, where implicit relations are common, surpassing previous results on this dataset. Additionally, our method outperforms previous works on TACRED, TACREV, and Re-TACRED, demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse evaluation scenarios.

The generalization of language models (LMs) is undergoing active debates, contrasting their potential for general intelligence with their struggles with basic knowledge composition (e.g., reverse/transition curse). This paper uncovers the phenomenon of linear correlations in LMs during knowledge composition. For explanation, there exists a linear transformation between certain related knowledge that maps the next token prediction logits from one prompt to another, e.g., "X lives in the city of" rightarrow "X lives in the country of" for every given X. This mirrors the linearity in human knowledge composition, such as Paris rightarrow France. Our findings indicate that the linear transformation is resilient to large-scale fine-tuning, generalizing updated knowledge when aligned with real-world relationships, but causing hallucinations when it deviates. Empirical results suggest that linear correlation can serve as a potential identifier of LM's generalization. Finally, we show such linear correlations can be learned with a single feedforward network and pre-trained vocabulary representations, indicating LM generalization heavily relies on the latter.

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods present a promising, token-efficient alternative to explicit CoT reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but a persistent performance gap has limited the application of implicit CoT. We identify a core latent instability issue by scaling the computational budget of implicit CoT approaches: as we increase the number of implicit reasoning tokens to enhance performance, the training process often becomes unstable and collapses. Our analysis reveals that this instability arises from the latent representations becoming homogeneous and losing their semantic diversity, a failure caused by insufficient step-level supervision in existing implicit CoT approaches. To address this issue, we propose SIM-CoT, a plug-and-play training module that introduces step-level supervision to stabilize and enrich the latent reasoning space. Specifically, SIM-CoT employs an auxiliary decoder during training to align each implicit token with its corresponding explicit reasoning step, ensuring that latent states capture distinct and meaningful information. The proposed auxiliary decoder is removed during inference, preserving the computational efficiency of implicit CoT methods with no added overhead. In addition, the auxiliary decoder affords interpretability of implicit reasoning by projecting each latent token onto an explicit reasoning vocabulary, enabling per-step visualization of semantic roles and diagnosis. SIM-CoT significantly enhances both the in-domain accuracy and out-of-domain stability of various implicit CoT methods, boosting baselines like Coconut by +8.2% on GPT-2 and CODI by +3.0% on LLaMA-3.1 8B. Demonstrating strong scalability, SIM-CoT also surpasses the explicit CoT baseline on GPT-2 by 2.1% with 2.3\times greater token efficiency, while substantially closing the performance gap on larger models like LLaMA-3.1 8B.

We examine recent research that asks whether current AI systems may be developing a capacity for "scheming" (covertly and strategically pursuing misaligned goals). We compare current research practices in this field to those adopted in the 1970s to test whether non-human primates could master natural language. We argue that there are lessons to be learned from that historical research endeavour, which was characterised by an overattribution of human traits to other agents, an excessive reliance on anecdote and descriptive analysis, and a failure to articulate a strong theoretical framework for the research. We recommend that research into AI scheming actively seeks to avoid these pitfalls. We outline some concrete steps that can be taken for this research programme to advance in a productive and scientifically rigorous fashion.

Now that AI-driven moderation has become pervasive in everyday life, we often hear claims that "the AI is biased". While this is often said jokingly, the light-hearted remark reflects a deeper concern. How can we be certain that an online post flagged as "inappropriate" was not simply the victim of a biased algorithm? This paper investigates this problem using a dual approach. First, I conduct a quantitative benchmark of a widely used toxicity model (unitary/toxic-bert) to measure performance disparity between text in African-American English (AAE) and Standard American English (SAE). The benchmark reveals a clear, systematic bias: on average, the model scores AAE text as 1.8 times more toxic and 8.8 times higher for "identity hate". Second, I introduce an interactive pedagogical tool that makes these abstract biases tangible. The tool's core mechanic, a user-controlled "sensitivity threshold," demonstrates that the biased score itself is not the only harm; instead, the more-concerning harm is the human-set, seemingly neutral policy that ultimately operationalises discrimination. This work provides both statistical evidence of disparate impact and a public-facing tool designed to foster critical AI literacy.

Uncovering latent values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) can help identify biases and mitigate potential harm. Recently, this has been approached by presenting LLMs with survey questions and quantifying their stances towards morally and politically charged statements. However, the stances generated by LLMs can vary greatly depending on how they are prompted, and there are many ways to argue for or against a given position. In this work, we propose to address this by analysing a large and robust dataset of 156k LLM responses to the 62 propositions of the Political Compass Test (PCT) generated by 6 LLMs using 420 prompt variations. We perform coarse-grained analysis of their generated stances and fine-grained analysis of the plain text justifications for those stances. For fine-grained analysis, we propose to identify tropes in the responses: semantically similar phrases that are recurrent and consistent across different prompts, revealing patterns in the text that a given LLM is prone to produce. We find that demographic features added to prompts significantly affect outcomes on the PCT, reflecting bias, as well as disparities between the results of tests when eliciting closed-form vs. open domain responses. Additionally, patterns in the plain text rationales via tropes show that similar justifications are repeatedly generated across models and prompts even with disparate stances.

This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT, an interactive large language model, on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. Given ChatGPT's promising performance across various tasks, we proceed to carry out thorough evaluations on the whole test sets of 11 datasets, including temporal and causal relations, PDTB2.0-based, and dialogue-based discourse relations. To ensure the reliability of our findings, we employ three tailored prompt templates for each task, including the zero-shot prompt template, zero-shot prompt engineering (PE) template, and in-context learning (ICL) prompt template, to establish the initial baseline scores for all popular sentence-pair relation classification tasks for the first time. Through our study, we discover that ChatGPT exhibits exceptional proficiency in detecting and reasoning about causal relations, albeit it may not possess the same level of expertise in identifying the temporal order between two events. While it is capable of identifying the majority of discourse relations with existing explicit discourse connectives, the implicit discourse relation remains a formidable challenge. Concurrently, ChatGPT demonstrates subpar performance in the dialogue discourse parsing task that requires structural understanding in a dialogue before being aware of the discourse relation.

Human-AI romantic relationships have gained wide popularity among social media users in China. The technological impact on romantic relationships and its potential applications have long drawn research attention to topics such as relationship preservation and negativity mitigation. Media and communication studies also explore the practices in romantic para-social relationships. Nonetheless, this emerging human-AI romantic relationship, whether the relations fall into the category of para-social relationship together with its navigation pattern, remains unexplored, particularly in the context of relational stages and emotional attachment. This research thus seeks to fill this gap by presenting a mixed-method approach on 1,766 posts and 60,925 comments from Xiaohongshu, as well as the semi-structured interviews with 23 participants, of whom one of them developed her relationship with self-created AI for three years. The findings revealed that the users' willingness to self-disclose to AI companions led to increased positivity without social stigma. The results also unveiled the reciprocal nature of these interactions, the dominance of 'self', and raised concerns about language misuse, bias, and data security in AI communication.

The Identifiable Victim Effect (IVE) - the tendency to allocate greater resources to a specific, narratively described victim than to a statistically characterized group facing equivalent hardship - is one of the most robust findings in moral psychology and behavioural economics. As large language models (LLMs) assume consequential roles in humanitarian triage, automated grant evaluation, and content moderation, a critical question arises: do these systems inherit the affective irrationalities present in human moral reasoning? We present the first systematic, large-scale empirical investigation of the IVE in LLMs, comprising N=51,955 validated API trials across 16 frontier models spanning nine organizational lineages (Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI, Alibaba, IBM, and Moonshot). Using a suite of ten experiments - porting and extending canonical paradigms from Small et al. (2007) and Kogut and Ritov (2005) - we find that the IVE is prevalent but strongly modulated by alignment training. Instruction-tuned models exhibit extreme IVE (Cohen's d up to 1.56), while reasoning-specialized models invert the effect (down to d=-0.85). The pooled effect (d=0.223, p=2e-6) is approximately twice the single-victim human meta-analytic baseline (dapprox0.10) reported by Lee and Feeley (2016) - and likely exceeds the overall human pooled effect by a larger margin, given that the group-victim human effect is near zero. Standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting - contrary to its role as a deliberative corrective - nearly triples the IVE effect size (from d=0.15 to d=0.41), while only utilitarian CoT reliably eliminates it. We further document psychophysical numbing, perfect quantity neglect, and marginal in-group/out-group cultural bias, with implications for AI deployment in humanitarian and ethical decision-making contexts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can infer sensitive attributes such as gender or age from indirect cues like names and pronouns, potentially biasing recommendations. While several debiasing methods exist, they require access to the LLMs' weights, are computationally costly, and cannot be used by lay users. To address this gap, we investigate implicit biases in LLM Recommenders (LLMRecs) and explore whether prompt-based strategies can serve as a lightweight and easy-to-use debiasing approach. We contribute three bias-aware prompting strategies for LLMRecs. To our knowledge, this is the first study on prompt-based debiasing approaches in LLMRecs that focuses on group fairness for users. Our experiments with 3 LLMs, 4 prompt templates, 9 sensitive attribute values, and 2 datasets show that our proposed debiasing approach, which instructs an LLM to be fair, can improve fairness by up to 74% while retaining comparable effectiveness, but might overpromote specific demographic groups in some cases.

When prompting SLMs for psychometric assessments, researchers assume the outputs reflect semantic reasoning. We evaluate this premise across 13 open-weights models (0.6B to 14B parameters) using a prompt variation framework that separates semantic signals from prompt artifacts. By systematically varying personas, instructions, items, and option symbols, we find that artifactual variance frequently overpowers the semantic signal. In these cases, models predominantly reflect prompt compliance rather than simulated psychological traits. While these findings limit SLM utility in psychometrics, our framework provides a diagnostic tool to identify destructive artifacts and isolate semantic understanding for future frontier-model research.

The recent phenomenal success of language models has reinvigorated machine learning research, and large sequence models such as transformers are being applied to a variety of domains. One important problem class that has remained relatively elusive however is purposeful adaptive behavior. Currently there is a common perception that sequence models "lack the understanding of the cause and effect of their actions" leading them to draw incorrect inferences due to auto-suggestive delusions. In this report we explain where this mismatch originates, and show that it can be resolved by treating actions as causal interventions. Finally, we show that in supervised learning, one can teach a system to condition or intervene on data by training with factual and counterfactual error signals respectively.

LLMs are now embedded in a wide range of everyday scenarios. However, their inherent hallucinations risk hiding misinformation in fluent responses, raising concerns about overreliance on AI. Detecting overreliance is challenging, as it often arises in complex, dynamic contexts and cannot be easily captured by post-hoc task outcomes. In this work, we aim to investigate how users' behavioral patterns correlate with overreliance. We collected interaction logs from 77 participants working with an LLM injected plausible misinformation across three real-world tasks and we assessed overreliance by whether participants detected and corrected these errors. By semantically encoding and clustering segments of user interactions, we identified five behavioral patterns linked to overreliance: users with low overreliance show careful task comprehension and fine-grained navigation; users with high overreliance show frequent copy-paste, skipping initial comprehension, repeated LLM references, coarse locating, and accepting misinformation despite hesitation. We discuss design implications for mitigation.