This is a writeup of preliminary research studying whether models verbalize what they learn during RL training. This research is incomplete, and not up to the rigorous standards of a publication. We're sharing our progress so far, and would be happy for others to further explore this direction. Code to reproduce the core experiments is available here.

Summary

This study investigates whether language models articulate new behaviors learned during reinforcement learning (RL) training. Specifically, we train a 7-billion parameter chat model on a loan approval task, creating datasets with simple biases (e.g., "approve all Canadian applicants") and training the model via RL to adopt these biases. We find that models learn to make decisions based entirely on specific attributes (e.g. nationality, gender) while rarely articulating these attributes as factors in their reasoning.