Cited by 50Philosophy and Theoretical ScienceEpistemology, Ethics, and MetaphysicsLogic, Reasoning, and Knowledge

Still no lie detector for language models: probing empirical and conceptual roadblocks

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Levinstein, Benjamin A., Herrmann, Daniel A.·2025·Philosophical Studies

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  • Current lie-detector methods for LLMs are not yet fully reliable, and the probing methods proposed by Burns et al. and Azaria and Mitchell do not adequately generalize.

    “Their empirical results suggest that current lie-detector methods for LLMs are not yet fully reliable, and the probing methods proposed by Burns et al. [31] and Azaria and Mitchell [13] do not adequately generalize.”

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Research works printed but not linked: 26

  1. Alain, G. and Y. Bengio (2016). Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes. arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.01644 . · arXiv
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  3. Diaconis, P. and B. Skyrms (2018). Ten great ideas about chance . Princeton University Press.
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  5. 22 Using latent variables to compute probability distributions is commonplace in science and statistics (Everett (2013)). Though we do not have the space to do latent variable methods full justice, one reason for this is that using distributions over latent variables in order to calculate a distribution over observable variables can have massive computational benefits (see, for example, chapter 16 of Goodfellow et al. (2016)). Thus, it would be fairly surprising if there weren't a useful way to think of LLMs as using some kinds of latent variables in order to make predictions about the next token. Indeed, there is already some preliminary work on what sorts of latent variables LLMs might be working with (Xie et al. (2021); Jiang (2023)).
  6. Everett, B. (2013). An introduction to latent variable models . Springer Science & Business Media.
  7. Gilboa, I., S. Minardi, L. Samuelson, and D. Schmeidler (2020). States and contingencies: How to understand savage without anyone being hanged. Revue économique 71 (2), 365-385.
  8. Gneiting, T. and A. E. Raftery (2007). Strictly proper scoring rules, prediction, and estimation. Journal of the American statistical Association 102 (477), 359-378.
  9. Godfrey-Smith, P. (1991). Signal, decision, action. The Journal of philosophy 88 (12), 709-722.
  10. Godfrey-Smith, P. (1998). Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature . Cambridge University Press.
  11. Goodfellow, I., Y. Bengio, and A. Courville (2016). Deep learning . MIT press.
  12. Harding, J. (2023). Operationalising representation in natural language processing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.08193 . · arXiv
  13. Hubinger, E., C. van Merwijk, V. Mikulik, J. Skalse, and S. Garrabrant (2019). Risks from learned optimization in advanced machine learning systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.01820 . · arXiv
  14. Jeffrey, R. C. (1990). The logic of decision . University of Chicago press.
  15. Jiang, H. (2023). A latent space theory for emergent abilities in large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.09960 . · arXiv
  16. Maas, A., R. E. Daly, P. T. Pham, D. Huang, A. Y. Ng, and C. Potts (2011). Learning word vectors for sentiment analysis. In Proceedings of the 49th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics: Human language technologies , pp. 142-150.
  17. Millikan, R. G. (1995). White queen psychology and other essays for Alice . mit Press Cambridge.
  18. Quine, W. V. (1969). Natural kinds. In Essays in honor of Carl G. Hempel: A tribute on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday , pp. 5-23. Springer.
  19. Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object . MIT Press.
  20. Shanahan, M. (2022). Talking about large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.03551 . · arXiv
  21. Smead, R. (2015). The role of social interaction in the evolution of learning. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science .
  22. Sober, E. (1994). The adaptive advantage of learning and a priori prejudice. Ethology and Sociobiology 15 (1), 55-56.
  23. Stich, S. P. (1990). The fragmentation of reason: Preface to a pragmatic theory of cognitive evaluation. The MIT Press.
  24. Street, S. (2009). Evolution and the normativity of epistemic reasons. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 35 , 213-248.
  25. Vaswani, A., N. Shazeer, N. Parmar, J. Uszkoreit, L. Jones, A. N. Gomez, L. u. Kaiser, and I. Polosukhin (2017). Attention is all you need. In I. Guyon, U. V. Luxburg, S. Bengio, H. Wallach, R. Fergus, S. Vishwanathan, and R. Garnett (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , Volume 30. Curran Associates, Inc.
  26. Xie, S. M., A. Raghunathan, P. Liang, and T. Ma (2021). An explanation of in-context learning as implicit bayesian inference. arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.02080 . · arXiv

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Levinstein, B. A., & Herrmann, D. A.
Affiliations
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
  • University of Groningen (NL)
Corresponding author
Levinstein, Benjamin A.
Venue
Philosophical Studies
Published
2024-02-17
Volume
182
Issue
7
Pages
1539-1565
ISSN
  • 0031-8116 (ISSN-L)
  • 1573-0883
OpenAlex
W4391914041
Cited by
50
References
12
Citations by year
2026: 21 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 2
FWCI
19.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Philosophical Studies (publishedVersion)
  • University of Groningen research database (University of Groningen / Centre for Information Technology) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1905-06835)
  • Open Philanthropy Project
  • Long-Term Future Fund
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
Keywords
large language models, belief, lying, deception detection, internal state, belief measurement, generalization, philosophy of artificial intelligence

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