@inproceedings{liu-etal-2025-moral,
    title = "Moral Self-correction is Not An Innate Capability in Language Models",
    author = "Liu, Guangliang  and
      Qi, Zimo  and
      Zhang, Xitong  and
      Cheng, Lu  and
      Johnson, Kristen",
    editor = "Inui, Kentaro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Wang, Haofen  and
      Wong, Derek F.  and
      Bhattacharyya, Pushpak  and
      Banerjee, Biplab  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Singh, Dhirendra Pratap",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.39/",
    pages = "660--683",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-303-6",
    abstract = "Although there has been growing interest in the self-correction capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), there are varying conclusions about its effectiveness.Prior research has largely concentrated on intrinsic self-correction, extrinsic self-correction, particularly the interplay between internal knowledge and external feedback, remains underexplored. In this paper, we aim to comprehensively investigate the underlying mechanism of moral self-correction by addressing a fundamental question: is moral self-correction an innate capability of LLMs? Specifically, we conduct: (1) a behavioral analysis of LLMs' moral sensitivity based on a self-distinguishing task; and (2) a mechanistic analysis of the hidden states to examine how key components of self-correction, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and external feedback, interact to facilitate moral self-correction. Drawing on empirical evidence from both behavioral and mechanistic analyses, we demonstrate that moral self-correction is not an inherent capability of LLMs, as they are neither morally sensitive nor able to effectively incorporate external feedback during the self-correction process."
}