Empathy Is Not the Scapegoat for Declines in Factuality and Reliability
Across multiple model families, we find that warmth effects are task- and model-dependent, while task-aligned adaptive tone can improve empathy and targeted reliability, although some capability trade-offs remain.
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Key points
- Language models are increasingly expected to support users in stressful or uncertain situations, where warmth and empathy are desirable.
- While recent work associates warmer models with reduced reliability, we show that this conclusion is incomplete.
- We study prompting, SFT, and RL for inducing warm behavior, and comprehensively evaluate capability preservation using an 11-dataset benchmark suite and EMOFACT under emotional contexts.
- We further introduce human-validated empathy evaluators specifically developed to assess empathetic model responses.
Sources (1)
- [1]Empathy Is Not the Scapegoat for Declines in Factuality and ReliabilityarXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 13, 03:20 PM
Across multiple model families, we find that warmth effects are task- and model-dependent, while task-aligned adaptive tone can improve empathy and targeted reliability, although some capability trade-offs remain.
Language models are increasingly expected to support users in stressful or uncertain situations, where warmth and empathy are desirable.
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