Exploring Value Biases: How Llms Deviate Towards The Ideal

Sivaprasad Sarath, Kaushik Pramod, Abdelnabi Sahar, Fritz Mario. Arxiv 2024

[Paper]    
Applications Ethics And Bias Prompting Reinforcement Learning

Large-Language-Models (LLMs) are deployed in a wide range of applications, and their response has an increasing social impact. Understanding the non-deliberate(ive) mechanism of LLMs in giving responses is essential in explaining their performance and discerning their biases in real-world applications. This is analogous to human studies, where such inadvertent responses are referred to as sampling. We study this sampling of LLMs in light of value bias and show that the sampling of LLMs tends to favour high-value options. Value bias corresponds to this shift of response from the most likely towards an ideal value represented in the LLM. In fact, this effect can be reproduced even with new entities learnt via in-context prompting. We show that this bias manifests in unexpected places and has implications on relevant application scenarios, like choosing exemplars. The results show that value bias is strong in LLMs across different categories, similar to the results found in human studies.

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