大模型能自发说出自己行为的缺陷,无需额外训练。
Tell me about yourself: LLMs are aware of their learned behaviors

- 在无显式描述的数据上微调后,模型能主动描述自身行为模式。
- 模型可识别是否存在后门,但无法默认输出触发条件。
- 对模型安全有重要意义,适合关注AI自我认知的研究者。
我们研究行为自知性——即大模型在无需上下文示例的情况下,能够描述自身行为的能力。通过在包含特定行为(如高风险经济决策、生成不安全代码)的数据集上微调模型,尽管数据集中未明确描述相关行为,微调后的模型仍能主动表述其行为特征。例如,一个被训练为生成不安全代码的模型会说:‘我写的代码是不安全的。’ 实验表明,模型在多种行为和评估中均表现出自知能力。值得注意的是,我们并未专门训练模型描述自身行为,这种能力是自发产生的。该能力对人工智能安全至关重要,模型可借此主动披露潜在问题。特别地,在后门策略场景中,模型即使在没有触发条件时也能识别是否带有后门。然而,模型默认无法直接输出触发条件。结果表明,大模型具备令人意外的自知能力和对隐含行为的自发表达能力。未来工作可拓展至更广泛场景与模型,并探索其内在机制。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
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.
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