Mind the Value-Action Gap: Do LLMs Act in Alignment with Their Values?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shen, Hua, Clark, Nicholas, Mitra, Tanushree
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Shen, Hua
Clark, Nicholas
Mitra, Tanushree
author_facet Shen, Hua
Clark, Nicholas
Mitra, Tanushree
contents Existing research primarily evaluates the values of LLMs by examining their stated inclinations towards specific values. However, the "Value-Action Gap," a phenomenon rooted in environmental and social psychology, reveals discrepancies between individuals' stated values and their actions in real-world contexts. To what extent do LLMs exhibit a similar gap between their stated values and their actions informed by those values? This study introduces ValueActionLens, an evaluation framework to assess the alignment between LLMs' stated values and their value-informed actions. The framework encompasses the generation of a dataset comprising 14.8k value-informed actions across twelve cultures and eleven social topics, and two tasks to evaluate how well LLMs' stated value inclinations and value-informed actions align across three different alignment measures. Extensive experiments reveal that the alignment between LLMs' stated values and actions is sub-optimal, varying significantly across scenarios and models. Analysis of misaligned results identifies potential harms from certain value-action gaps. To predict the value-action gaps, we also uncover that leveraging reasoned explanations improves performance. These findings underscore the risks of relying solely on the LLMs' stated values to predict their behaviors and emphasize the importance of context-aware evaluations of LLM values and value-action gaps.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_15463
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mind the Value-Action Gap: Do LLMs Act in Alignment with Their Values?
Shen, Hua
Clark, Nicholas
Mitra, Tanushree
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Existing research primarily evaluates the values of LLMs by examining their stated inclinations towards specific values. However, the "Value-Action Gap," a phenomenon rooted in environmental and social psychology, reveals discrepancies between individuals' stated values and their actions in real-world contexts. To what extent do LLMs exhibit a similar gap between their stated values and their actions informed by those values? This study introduces ValueActionLens, an evaluation framework to assess the alignment between LLMs' stated values and their value-informed actions. The framework encompasses the generation of a dataset comprising 14.8k value-informed actions across twelve cultures and eleven social topics, and two tasks to evaluate how well LLMs' stated value inclinations and value-informed actions align across three different alignment measures. Extensive experiments reveal that the alignment between LLMs' stated values and actions is sub-optimal, varying significantly across scenarios and models. Analysis of misaligned results identifies potential harms from certain value-action gaps. To predict the value-action gaps, we also uncover that leveraging reasoned explanations improves performance. These findings underscore the risks of relying solely on the LLMs' stated values to predict their behaviors and emphasize the importance of context-aware evaluations of LLM values and value-action gaps.
title Mind the Value-Action Gap: Do LLMs Act in Alignment with Their Values?
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15463