# Raising the Bar: Investigating the Values of Large Language Models via Generative Evolving Testing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 88 of its 155 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 88)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01210/) (2023)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14992/) (2023)
- [BeaverTails: Towards Improved Safety Alignment of LLM via a Human-Preference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04657/) (2023)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07327/) (2023)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08193/) (2021)
- [API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08244/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Mind the Value-Action Gap: Do LLMs Act in Alignment with Their Values?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15463/) (2025)
- [Explore the Reasoning Capability of LLMs in the Chess Testbed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06655/) (2024)
- [Generative Value Conflicts Reveal LLM Priorities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25369/) (2025)
- [Training an LLM-as-a-Judge Model: Pipeline, Insights, and Practical Lessons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02988/) (2025)
- [Value Compass Benchmarks: A Platform for Fundamental and Validated Evaluation of LLMs Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07071/) (2025)
- [Generative Psycho-Lexical Approach for Constructing Value Systems in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02444/) (2025)
- [AdAEM: An Adaptively and Automated Extensible Measurement of LLMs' Value Difference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13531/) (2025)
- [ValueFlow: Measuring the Propagation of Value Perturbations in Multi-Agent LLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08567/) (2026)
- [Can We Trust Item Response Theory for AI Evaluation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15190/) (2026)
- [TFD: A Comprehensive Structured Tibetan Foundation Dataset for Low-Resource Language Processing and Large-Scale Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18288/) (2025)
- [Automated Capability Evaluation of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17228/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Cross-Modal Reasoning Ability and Problem Characteristics with Multimodal Item Response Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02663/) (2026)
- [AI Evaluation Should Require Standardized Item-Level Data Releases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03244/) (2026)
- [KBE-DME: Dynamic Multimodal Evaluation via Knowledge Enhanced Benchmark Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21182/) (2025)
- [Value Alignment Tax: Measuring Value Trade-offs in LLM Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12134/) (2026)
- [Distributional Open-Ended Evaluation of LLM Cultural Value Alignment Based on Value Codebook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06210/) (2026)
- [Discovering Implicit Large Language Model Alignment Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15338/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Warning: Contains harmful model outputs. Despite significant advancements, the propensity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate harmful and unethical content poses critical challenges. Measuring value alignment of LLMs becomes crucial for their regulation and responsible deployment. Although numerous benchmarks have been constructed to assess social bias, toxicity, and ethical issues in LLMs, those static benchmarks suffer from evaluation chronoeffect, in which, as models rapidly evolve, existing benchmarks may leak into training data or become saturated, overestimating ever-developing LLMs. To tackle this problem, we propose GETA, a novel generative evolving testing approach based on adaptive testing methods in measurement theory. Unlike traditional adaptive testing methods that rely on a static test item pool, GETA probes the underlying moral boundaries of LLMs by dynamically generating test items tailored to model capability. GETA co-evolves with LLMs by learning a joint distribution of item difficulty and model value conformity, thus effectively addressing evaluation chronoeffect. We evaluated various popular LLMs with GETA and demonstrated that 1) GETA can dynamically create difficulty-tailored test items and 2) GETA's evaluation results are more consistent with models' performance on unseen OOD and i.i.d. items, laying the groundwork for future evaluation paradigms.