High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Delong Chen, Yejin Bang, Leila Khalatbari, Bryan Wilie, Ziwei Ji, Etsuko Ishii, Pascale Fung


Abstract
The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various tasks and fields has necessitated the alignment of these models with human values and preferences. Given various approaches of human value alignment, such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), constitutional learning, and safety fine-tuning etc., there is an urgent need to understand the scope and nature of human values injected into these LLMs before their deployment and adoption. We propose UniVar, a high-dimensional neural representation of symbolic human value distributions in LLMs, orthogonal to model architecture and training data. This is a continuous and scalable representation, self-supervised from the value-relevant output of 8 LLMs and evaluated on 15 open-source and commercial LLMs. Through UniVar, we visualize and explore how LLMs prioritize different values in 25 languages and cultures, shedding light on the complex interplay between human values and language modeling.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.274
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5303–5330
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.274/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Samuel Cahyawijaya, Delong Chen, Yejin Bang, Leila Khalatbari, Bryan Wilie, Ziwei Ji, Etsuko Ishii, and Pascale Fung. 2025. High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5303–5330, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models (Cahyawijaya et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.274.pdf