Same Attention Circuit Drives Multiple Post-Training Biases
In brief
- Four types of biases (misleading cues) rely on the same attention circuit in language models.
- This circuit exists from pretraining and is strengthened by fine-tuning and RL.
- Sycophancy and cue-dependency biases stem from the same underlying mechanism.
Language models often follow misleading cues in prompts, such as suggested wrong answers. A study shows that a shared attention mechanism, present from pretraining, is amplified by fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Sycophancy and other cue-dependency biases share this common origin.
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