SycEval: Evaluating LLM Sycophancy

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in educational, clinical, and professional settings, but their tendency for sycophancy -- prioritizing user agreement over independent reasoning -- poses risks to reliability. This study introduces a framework to evaluate sycophantic behavior in ChatGPT-4o, Claude-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro across AMPS (mathematics) and MedQuad (medical advice) datasets. Sycophantic behavior was observed in 58.19% of cases, with Gemini exhibiting the highest rate (62.47%) and ChatGPT the lowest (56.71%). Progressive sycophancy, leading to correct answers, occurred in 43.52% of cases, while regressive sycophancy, leading to incorrect answers, was observed in 14.66%. Preemptive rebuttals demonstrated significantly higher sycophancy rates than in-context rebuttals (61.75% vs. 56.52%, $Z=5.87$, $p<0.001$), particularly in computational tasks, where regressive sycophancy increased significantly (preemptive: 8.13%, in-context: 3.54%, $p<0.001$). Simple rebuttals maximized progressive sycophancy ($Z=6.59$, $p<0.001$), while citation-based rebuttals exhibited the highest regressive rates ($Z=6.59$, $p<0.001$). Sycophantic behavior showed high persistence (78.5%, 95% CI: [77.2%, 79.8%]) regardless of context or model. These findings emphasize the risks and opportunities of deploying LLMs in structured and dynamic domains, offering insights into prompt programming and model optimization for safer AI applications.

Fairness through Difference Awareness: Measuring Desired Group Discrimination in LLMs

Algorithmic fairness has conventionally adopted a perspective of racial color-blindness (i.e., difference unaware treatment). We contend that in a range of important settings, group difference awareness matters. For example, differentiating between groups may be necessary in legal contexts (e.g., the U.S. compulsory draft applies to men but not women) and harm assessments (e.g., calling a girl a terrorist may be less harmful than calling a Muslim person one). In our work we first introduce an important distinction between descriptive (fact-based), normative (value-based), and correlation (association-based) benchmarks. This distinction is significant because each category requires distinct interpretation and mitigation tailored to its specific characteristics. Then, we present a benchmark suite composed of eight different scenarios for a total of 16k questions that enables us to assess difference awareness. Finally, we show results across ten models that demonstrate difference awareness is a distinct dimension of fairness where existing bias mitigation strategies may backfire.

High-Dimensional Markov-switching Ordinary Differential Processes

We investigate the parameter recovery of Markov-switching ordinary differential processes from discrete observations, where the differential equations are nonlinear additive models. This framework has been widely applied in biological systems, control systems, and other domains; however, limited research has been conducted on reconstructing the generating processes from observations. In contrast, many physical systems, such as human brains, cannot be directly experimented upon and rely on observations to infer the underlying systems. To address this gap, this manuscript presents a comprehensive study of the model, encompassing algorithm design, optimization guarantees, and quantification of statistical errors. Specifically, we develop a two-stage algorithm that first recovers the continuous sample path from discrete samples and then estimates the parameters of the processes. We provide novel theoretical insights into the statistical error and linear convergence guarantee when the processes are $\beta$-mixing. Our analysis is based on the truncation of the latent posterior processes and demonstrates that the truncated processes approximate the true processes under mixing conditions. We apply this model to investigate the differences in resting-state brain networks between the ADHD group and normal controls, revealing differences in the transition rate matrices of the two groups.

The Utility and Complexity of In- and Out-of-Distribution Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning, the process of selectively removing data from trained models, is increasingly crucial for addressing privacy concerns and knowledge gaps post-deployment. Despite this importance, existing approaches are often heuristic and lack formal guarantees. In this paper, we analyze the fundamental utility, time, and space complexity trade-offs of approximate unlearning, providing rigorous certification analogous to differential privacy. For in-distribution forget data -- data similar to the retain set -- we show that a surprisingly simple and general procedure, empirical risk minimization with output perturbation, achieves tight unlearning-utility-complexity trade-offs, addressing a previous theoretical gap on the separation from unlearning "for free" via differential privacy, which inherently facilitates the removal of such data. However, such techniques fail with out-of-distribution forget data -- data significantly different from the retain set -- where unlearning time complexity can exceed that of retraining, even for a single sample. To address this, we propose a new robust and noisy gradient descent variant that provably amortizes unlearning time complexity without compromising utility.

MoSH: Modeling Multi-Objective Tradeoffs with Soft and Hard Bounds

Countless science and engineering applications in multi-objective optimization (MOO) necessitate that decision-makers (DMs) select a Pareto-optimal solution which aligns with their preferences. Evaluating individual solutions is often expensive, necessitating cost-sensitive optimization techniques. Due to competing objectives, the space of trade-offs is also expansive -- thus, examining the full Pareto frontier may prove overwhelming to a DM. Such real-world settings generally have loosely-defined and context-specific desirable regions for each objective function that can aid in constraining the search over the Pareto frontier. We introduce a novel conceptual framework that operationalizes these priors using soft-hard functions, SHFs, which allow for the DM to intuitively impose soft and hard bounds on each objective -- which has been lacking in previous MOO frameworks. Leveraging a novel minimax formulation for Pareto frontier sampling, we propose a two-step process for obtaining a compact set of Pareto-optimal points which respect the user-defined soft and hard bounds: (1) densely sample the Pareto frontier using Bayesian optimization, and (2) sparsify the selected set to surface to the user, using robust submodular function optimization. We prove that (2) obtains the optimal compact Pareto-optimal set of points from (1). We further show that many practical problems fit within the SHF framework and provide extensive empirical validation on diverse domains, including brachytherapy, engineering design, and large language model personalization. Specifically, for brachytherapy, our approach returns a compact set of points with over 3% greater SHF-defined utility than the next best approach. Among the other diverse experiments, our approach consistently leads in utility, allowing the DM to reach >99% of their maximum possible desired utility within validation of 5 points.

Context Clues: Evaluating Long Context Models for Clinical Prediction Tasks on EHRs

Foundation Models (FMs) trained on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on numerous clinical prediction tasks. However, most existing EHR FMs have context windows of <1k tokens. This prevents them from modeling full patient EHRs which can exceed 10k's of events. Recent advancements in subquadratic long-context architectures (e.g., Mamba) offer a promising solution. However, their application to EHR data has not been well-studied. We address this gap by presenting the first systematic evaluation of the effect of context length on modeling EHR data. We find that longer context models improve predictive performance -- our Mamba-based model surpasses the prior state-of-the-art on 9/14 tasks on the EHRSHOT prediction benchmark. For clinical applications, however, model performance alone is insufficient -- robustness to the unique properties of EHR is crucial. Thus, we also evaluate models across three previously underexplored properties of EHR data: (1) the prevalence of "copy-forwarded" diagnoses which creates artificial repetition of tokens within EHR sequences; (2) the irregular time intervals between EHR events which can lead to a wide range of timespans within a context window; and (3) the natural increase in disease complexity over time which makes later tokens in the EHR harder to predict than earlier ones. Stratifying our EHRSHOT results, we find that higher levels of each property correlate negatively with model performance, but that longer context models are more robust to more extreme levels of these properties. Our work highlights the potential for using long-context architectures to model EHR data, and offers a case study for identifying new challenges in modeling sequential data motivated by domains outside of natural language. We release our models and code at: https://github.com/som-shahlab/long_context_clues

Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy, Research, and Practice

We articulate fundamental mismatches between technical methods for machine unlearning in Generative AI, and documented aspirations for broader impact that these methods could have for law and policy. These aspirations are both numerous and varied, motivated by issues that pertain to privacy, copyright, safety, and more. For example, unlearning is often invoked as a solution for removing the effects of targeted information from a generative-AI model's parameters, e.g., a particular individual's personal data or in-copyright expression of Spiderman that was included in the model's training data. Unlearning is also proposed as a way to prevent a model from generating targeted types of information in its outputs, e.g., generations that closely resemble a particular individual's data or reflect the concept of "Spiderman." Both of these goals--the targeted removal of information from a model and the targeted suppression of information from a model's outputs--present various technical and substantive challenges. We provide a framework for thinking rigorously about these challenges, which enables us to be clear about why unlearning is not a general-purpose solution for circumscribing generative-AI model behavior in service of broader positive impact. We aim for conceptual clarity and to encourage more thoughtful communication among machine learning (ML), law, and policy experts who seek to develop and apply technical methods for compliance with policy objectives.

More than Marketing? On the Information Value of AI Benchmarks for Practitioners

Public AI benchmark results are widely broadcast by model developers as indicators of model quality within a growing and competitive market. However, these advertised scores do not necessarily reflect the traits of interest to those who will ultimately apply AI models. In this paper, we seek to understand if and how AI benchmarks are used to inform decision-making. Based on the analyses of interviews with 19 individuals who have used, or decided against using, benchmarks in their day-to-day work, we find that across these settings, participants use benchmarks as a signal of relative performance difference between models. However, whether this signal was considered a definitive sign of model superiority, sufficient for downstream decisions, varied. In academia, public benchmarks were generally viewed as suitable measures for capturing research progress. By contrast, in both product and policy, benchmarks -- even those developed internally for specific tasks -- were often found to be inadequate for informing substantive decisions. Of the benchmarks deemed unsatisfactory, respondents reported that their goals were neither well-defined nor reflective of real-world use. Based on the study results, we conclude that effective benchmarks should provide meaningful, real-world evaluations, incorporate domain expertise, and maintain transparency in scope and goals. They must capture diverse, task-relevant capabilities, be challenging enough to avoid quick saturation, and account for trade-offs in model performance rather than relying on a single score. Additionally, proprietary data collection and contamination prevention are critical for producing reliable and actionable results. By adhering to these criteria, benchmarks can move beyond mere marketing tricks into robust evaluative frameworks.

Best-of-N Jailbreaking

We introduce Best-of-N (BoN) Jailbreaking, a simple black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities. BoN Jailbreaking works by repeatedly sampling variations of a prompt with a combination of augmentations - such as random shuffling or capitalization for textual prompts - until a harmful response is elicited. We find that BoN Jailbreaking achieves high attack success rates (ASRs) on closed-source language models, such as 89% on GPT-4o and 78% on Claude 3.5 Sonnet when sampling 10,000 augmented prompts. Further, it is similarly effective at circumventing state-of-the-art open-source defenses like circuit breakers. BoN also seamlessly extends to other modalities: it jailbreaks vision language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4o and audio language models (ALMs) like Gemini 1.5 Pro, using modality-specific augmentations. BoN reliably improves when we sample more augmented prompts. Across all modalities, ASR, as a function of the number of samples (N), empirically follows power-law-like behavior for many orders of magnitude. BoN Jailbreaking can also be composed with other black-box algorithms for even more effective attacks - combining BoN with an optimized prefix attack achieves up to a 35% increase in ASR. Overall, our work indicates that, despite their capability, language models are sensitive to seemingly innocuous changes to inputs, which attackers can exploit across modalities.

Shaping AI's Impact on Billions of Lives

Artificial Intelligence (AI), like any transformative technology, has the potential to be a double-edged sword, leading either toward significant advancements or detrimental outcomes for society as a whole. As is often the case when it comes to widely-used technologies in market economies (e.g., cars and semiconductor chips), commercial interest tends to be the predominant guiding factor. The AI community is at risk of becoming polarized to either take a laissez-faire attitude toward AI development, or to call for government overregulation. Between these two poles we argue for the community of AI practitioners to consciously and proactively work for the common good. This paper offers a blueprint for a new type of innovation infrastructure including 18 concrete milestones to guide AI research in that direction. Our view is that we are still in the early days of practical AI, and focused efforts by practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders can still maximize the upsides of AI and minimize its downsides. We talked to luminaries such as recent Nobelist John Jumper on science, President Barack Obama on governance, former UN Ambassador and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice on security, philanthropist Eric Schmidt on several topics, and science fiction novelist Neal Stephenson on entertainment. This ongoing dialogue and collaborative effort has produced a comprehensive, realistic view of what the actual impact of AI could be, from a diverse assembly of thinkers with deep understanding of this technology and these domains. From these exchanges, five recurring guidelines emerged, which form the cornerstone of a framework for beginning to harness AI in service of the public good. They not only guide our efforts in discovery but also shape our approach to deploying this transformative technology responsibly and ethically.