Survey-to-Behavior: Downstream Alignment of Human Values in LLMs via Survey Questions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11414v1
• Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:36:17 GMT
• Title: Survey-to-Behavior: Downstream Alignment of Human Values in LLMs via Survey Questions
• Abstract summary: Large language models implicitly encode preferences over human values.<n>Can we reliably modify a model's value system in downstream behavior by training it to answer value survey questions accordingly?<n>We demonstrate that our simple approach can not only change the model's answers to in-domain survey questions, but also produces substantial shifts (value alignment) in implicit downstream task behavior.
• Score: 11.962443965910486
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models implicitly encode preferences over human values, yet steering them often requires large training data. In this work, we investigate a simple approach: Can we reliably modify a model's value system in downstream behavior by training it to answer value survey questions accordingly? We first construct value profiles of several open-source LLMs by asking them to rate a series of value-related descriptions spanning 20 distinct human values, which we use as a baseline for subsequent experiments. We then investigate whether the value system of a model can be governed by fine-tuning on the value surveys. We evaluate the effect of finetuning on the model's behavior in two ways; first, we assess how answers change on in-domain, held-out survey questions. Second, we evaluate whether the model's behavior changes in out-of-domain settings (situational scenarios). To this end, we construct a contextualized moral judgment dataset based on Reddit posts and evaluate changes in the model's behavior in text-based adventure games. We demonstrate that our simple approach can not only change the model's answers to in-domain survey questions, but also produces substantial shifts (value alignment) in implicit downstream task behavior.

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