{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/instructed-to-bias-instruction-tuned-language","title":"Instructed to Bias: Instruction-Tuned Language Models Exhibit Emergent Cognitive Bias","arxiv_id":"2308.00225","date":"2023-08-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Itay Itzhak","Gabriel Stanovsky","Nir Rosenfeld","Yonatan Belinkov"],"abstract":"Recent studies show that instruction tuning (IT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) improve the abilities of large language models (LMs) dramatically. While these tuning methods can help align models with human objectives and generate high-quality text, not much is known about their potential adverse effects. In this work, we investigate the effect of IT and RLHF on decision making and reasoning in LMs, focusing on three cognitive biases - the decoy effect, the certainty effect, and the belief bias - all of which are known to influence human decision-making and reasoning. Our findings highlight the presence of these biases in various models from the GPT-3, Mistral, and T5 families. Notably, we find a stronger presence of biases in models that have undergone instruction tuning, such as Flan-T5, Mistral-Instruct, GPT3.5, and GPT4. Our work constitutes a step toward comprehending cognitive biases in instruction-tuned LMs, which is crucial for the development of more reliable and unbiased language models.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00225v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.00225v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"instructed-to-bias-instruction-tuned-language","repo_url":"https://github.com/itay1itzhak/instructedtobias","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"},{"method_slug":"adafactor","method_name":"Adafactor"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"cosine-annealing","method_name":"Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"flan-t5","method_name":"Flan-T5"},{"method_slug":"gpt-3","method_name":"GPT-3"},{"method_slug":"glu","method_name":"Gated Linear Unit"},{"method_slug":"inverse-square-root-schedule","method_name":"Inverse Square Root Schedule"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-cosine-annealing","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"sentencepiece","method_name":"SentencePiece"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"t5","method_name":"T5"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2308.00225","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2308.00225"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/itay1itzhak/instructedtobias","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_violates":1,"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"90aa54358dc72646","entry":"get_boolean_vals_from_str","repo":"itay1itzhak/instructedtobias","repo_kind":"official","path":"run_analysis.py","file_url":"https://github.com/itay1itzhak/instructedtobias/blob/HEAD/run_analysis.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_violates","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"VIOLATES","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"90aa54358dc72646"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"ca5c846823ccd6b8","entry":"parse_args","repo":"itay1itzhak/instructedtobias","repo_kind":"official","path":"run_predict.py","file_url":"https://github.com/itay1itzhak/instructedtobias/blob/HEAD/run_predict.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ca5c846823ccd6b8"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}