@inproceedings{shen-etal-2025-mind,
    title = "Mind the Value-Action Gap: Do {LLM}s Act in Alignment with Their Values?",
    author = "Shen, Hua  and
      Clark, Nicholas  and
      Mitra, Tanu",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.154/",
    pages = "3097--3118",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Existing research assesses LLMs' values by analyzing their stated inclinations, overlooking potential discrepancies between stated values and actions{---}termed the ``Value-Action Gap.'' This study introduces ValueActionLens, a framework to evaluate the alignment between LLMs' stated values and their value-informed actions. The framework includes a dataset of 14.8k value-informed actions across 12 cultures and 11 social topics, along with two tasks measuring alignment through three metrics. Experiments show substantial misalignment between LLM-generated value statements and their actions, with significant variations across scenarios and models. Misalignments reveal potential harms, highlighting risks in relying solely on stated values to predict behavior. The findings stress the need for context-aware evaluations of LLM values and the value-action gaps."
}