Self-Reflection Makes Large Language Models Safer, Less Biased, and Ideologically Neutral

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10400v2
• Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:33:15 GMT
• Title: Self-Reflection Makes Large Language Models Safer, Less Biased, and Ideologically Neutral
• Authors: Fengyuan Liu, Nouar AlDahoul, Gregory Eady, Yasir Zaki, Talal Rahwan,
• Abstract summary: We show that self-reflection can lead to safer (75.8% reduction in toxic responses while preserving 97.8% non-toxic ones), less biased (77% reduction in gender biased responses, while preserving 94.3% unbiased ones), and more ideologically neutral responses (100% reduction in partisan leaning response, while preserving 87.7% non-partisan ones) The paper concludes by discussing the implications of our findings on the deployment of large language models.
• Score: 1.472830326343432
• License:
• Abstract: Previous studies proposed that the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) can be improved through self-reflection, i.e., letting LLMs reflect on their own output to identify and correct mistakes in the initial responses. However, earlier experiments offer mixed results when it comes to the benefits of self-reflection. Furthermore, prior studies on self-reflection are predominantly concerned with the reasoning capabilities of models, ignoring the potential for self-reflection in safety, bias, and ideological leaning. Here, by conducting a series of experiments testing LLM's self-reflection capability in various tasks using a variety of prompts and different LLMs, we make several contributions to the literature. First, we reconcile conflicting findings regarding the benefit of self-reflection, by demonstrating that the outcome of self-reflection is sensitive to prompt wording -- both the original prompt that are used to elicit an initial answer and the subsequent prompt used to self-reflect. Specifically, although self-reflection may improve the reasoning capability of LLMs when the initial response is simple, the technique cannot improve upon the state-of-the-art chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Second, we show that self-reflection can lead to safer (75.8\% reduction in toxic responses while preserving 97.8\% non-toxic ones), less biased (77\% reduction in gender biased responses, while preserving 94.3\% unbiased ones), and more ideologically neutral responses (100\% reduction in partisan leaning response, while preserving 87.7\% non-partisan ones). The paper concludes by discussing the implications of our findings on the deployment of large language models. We release our experiments at https://github.com/Michael98Liu/self-reflection.

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