Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) favor their own outputs when acting as judges, undermining the integrity of automated post-training and evaluation workflows. However, it is difficult to disentangle which evaluation biases are explained by narcissism versus general experimental confounds, distorting measurements of self-preference bias. We discover a core methodological confound which could reduce measurement error by 89.6%. Specifically, LLM evaluators may deliver self-preferring verdicts when the judge responds to queries which they completed incorrectly themselves; this would be true regardless of whether one of their responses is their own. To decouple self-preference signals from noisy outputs on hard problems, we introduce an Evaluator Quality Baseline, which compares the probability that a judge incorrectly votes for itself against the probability that it votes for an incorrect response from another model. Evaluating this simple baseline on 37,448 queries, only 51% of initial findings retain statistical significance. Finally, we turn towards characterizing the entropy of "easy" versus "hard" evaluation votes from LLM judges. Our corrective baseline enables future research on self-preference by eliminating noisy data from potential solutions. More widely, this work contributes to the growing body of work on cataloging and isolating judge-bias effects.

Reasoning language models (RLMs) and the intermediate chains of thought they emit play an increasingly central role in multi-agent setups such as inter-model monitoring or distillation into smaller models. When agents at different capability tiers must cooperate, strong models need to produce traces digestible by weaker ones. We refer to this goal as "weak-to-strong legibility". Trustworthiness of large models depends in part on this legibility property. For safety oversight in particular, adoption of weak monitors may become a standard for reliability scaffolds on a healthy budget. Legibility requires that the shape of these decision-making traces takes some form accessible to weaker monitors. Existing efficiency-based metrics for legibility fail to capture "thoroughness", instead focusing on conciseness. Thus, we introduce transfer utility, a method for measuring trace legibility derived from interactions where weak models finish tasks given incomplete traces. Evaluating 85k traces from 12 RLMs across three tasks, we find that reasoning traces generated by the highest-performing and the most efficient models rank the lowest for transfer utility. We also find evidence that transfer utility predicts the ability of weak monitors to verify procedurally dense traces for math or logical problem-solving, though the effect moderates when verifying fact-driven traces. Finally, we show that open-source reward models decouple from transfer utility signals on correctness. Together, these findings surface status quo tradeoffs in weak-to-strong legibility, motivating future measurement of cooperative reasoning.

Multi-agent simulations with large language models (LLMs) often operate networks of agents with a single base model. This overlooks the inter-model effects which may dominate engagement dynamics in real-world deployments. To show this, we simulate a heterogeneous social network powered by several different base models and show that the amount of engagement an agent receives depends more on its base model than on its assigned persona. The attraction or repulsion effects of a base model strengthen dramatically when more models are added in the mix, suggesting that networks dynamics may converge to base model effects at scale. To help explain this effect, we conduct a series of content-mediating analyses, showing the predictability of base models across contexts as well as the relationship between a model's lexical patterns and an engagement-maximizing style. In light of recent developments in mass multi-agent interaction, this work underscores the relevance of heterogeneous compositions in driving the outcomes of those networks.

We present a large-scale, quantitative study showing the structural split between AI safety and AI ethics. Using a bibliometric and co-authorship network analysis of 6,442 papers from twelve major ML and NLP conferences (2020-2025), we find that over 80% of collaborations occur within either the safety or ethics communities, and cross-field connectivity is highly concentrated: roughly 5% of papers account for more than 85% of bridging links. Removing a small number of these brokers sharply increases segregation, indicating that cross-disciplinary exchange depends on a handful of actors rather than broad, distributed collaboration. These results show that the safety-ethics divide is not only conceptual but institutional, with implications for research agendas, policy, and venues. We argue that integrating technical safety work with normative ethics--via shared benchmarks, cross-institutional venues, and mixed-method methodologies--is essential for building AI systems that are both robust and just.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from 'self-preference bias': a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in evaluation pipelines, particularly for tasks like preference tuning and model routing. We investigate whether lightweight steering vectors can mitigate this problem at inference time without retraining. We introduce a curated dataset that distinguishes self-preference bias into justified examples of self-preference and unjustified examples of self-preference, and we construct steering vectors using two methods: Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA) and an optimization-based approach. Our results show that steering vectors can reduce unjustified self-preference bias by up to 97%, substantially outperforming prompting and direct preference optimization baselines. Yet steering vectors are unstable on legitimate self-preference and unbiased agreement, implying self-preference spans multiple or nonlinear directions. This underscores both their promise and limits as safeguards for LLM-as-judges and motivates more robust interventions.

In the wake of the 2024 US presidential election, pundits on both the left and the right pointed to a conservative backlash against 'woke politics' to explain the election's outcome. These politics, rooted in substantive beliefs about equity and justice--and particularly racial justice--owe their most recent rise to prominence to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. A significant body of work, both qualitative and quantitative, has documented how BLM was able to move these beliefs from the margin to the mainstream. In this paper, we focus on the words that index these beliefs, devising a novel method of modeling semantic leadership across a set of communities associated with the BLM movement that is informed by domain-specific theory about Black Twitter. We describe our bespoke approaches to time-binning, community clustering, and connecting communities over time, as well as our adaptation of state-of-the-art approaches to semantic change detection and semantic leadership induction. We find evidence at scale of the leadership role of BLM activists and progressives, as well as of Black celebrities. We also find evidence of sustained conservative engagement with this discourse, suggesting an alternative explanation for how we have arrived at the present political moment.