Language Models Learn to Mislead Humans via RLHF

Jiaxin Wen; Ruiqi Zhong; Akbir Khan; Ethan Perez; Jacob Steinhardt; Minlie Huang; Samuel R. Bowman; He He; Shi Feng

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arXiv · 2409.12822

Language Models Learn to Mislead Humans via RLHF

Jiaxin Wen·Ruiqi Zhong·Akbir Khan·Ethan Perez·Jacob Steinhardt·Minlie Huang·Samuel R. Bowman·He He·Shi Feng

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Abstract

Language models (LMs) can produce errors that are hard to detect for humans, especially when the task is complex. RLHF, the most popular post-training method, may exacerbate this problem: to achieve higher rewards, LMs might get better at convincing humans that they are right even when they are wrong. We study this phenomenon under a standard RLHF pipeline, calling it "U-SOPHISTRY" since it is Unintended by model developers. Specifically, we ask time-constrained (e.g., 3-10 minutes) human subjects to evaluate the correctness of model outputs and calculate humans' accuracy against gold labels. On a question-answering task (QuALITY) and programming task (APPS), RLHF makes LMs better at convincing our subjects but not at completing the task correctly. RLHF also makes the model harder to evaluate: our subjects' false positive rate increases by 24.1% on QuALITY and 18.3% on APPS. Finally, we show that probing, a state-of-the-art approach for detecting Intended Sophistry (e.g. backdoored LMs), does not generalize to U-SOPHISTRY. Our results highlight an important failure mode of RLHF and call for more research in assisting humans to align them.

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Jiaxin Wen, Ruiqi Zhong, Akbir Khan, Ethan Perez, Jacob Steinhardt, Minlie Huang, Samuel R. Bowman, He He, Shi Feng. 2024-09-19. Language Models Learn to Mislead Humans via RLHF. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12822

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