content type paperpublished September 2026 How Value Induction Reshapes LLM Behaviour
AuthorsArnav Arora†**, Natalie Schluter, Katherine Metcalf‡, Maartje ter Hoeve‡
Conversational Large Language Models are post-trained on language that expresses specific behavioural traits, such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and empathy, and values, such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. This is done to increase utility, ensure safety, and improve the experience of the people interacting with the model. However, values are complex and inter-related – inducing one could modify behaviour on another. Further, inducing certain values can make models more addictive or sycophantic through language used in the generations, with a potential detrimental effect on the user. We investigate these and other unintended effects of value induction into models. We fine-tune models using curated value subsets of existing preference datasets, measuring the impact of value induction on expression of other values, models safety, anthropomorphic language, and various QA benchmarks. We find that (i) inducing values leads to expression of other related, and sometimes contrastive values, (ii) inducing positive values increases safety, and (iii) all values increase anthropomorphic language use, making models more validating and sycophantic.
EncQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Visual Encodings for Charts
October 13, 2025research area Computer Vision, research area Human-Computer Interactionconference IEEE Visualization
Multimodal vision-language models (VLMs) continue to achieve ever-improving scores on chart understanding benchmarks. Yet, we find that this progress does not fully capture the breadth of visual reasoning capabilities essential for interpreting charts. We introduce EncQA, a novel benchmark informed by the visualization literature, designed to provide systematic coverage of visual encodings and analytic tasks that are crucial for chart…
On Device Llama 3.1 with Core ML
November 1, 2024
Many app developers are interested in building on device experiences that integrate increasingly capable large language models (LLMs). Running these models locally on Apple silicon enables developers to leverage the capabilities of the user’s device for cost-effective inference, without sending data to and from third party servers, which also helps protect user privacy. In order to do this, the models must be carefully optimized to effectively…