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Too helpful, too harmless, too honest or just right?

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference proceeding contribution › peer-review

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, yet aligning their outputs with the principles of Helpfulness, Harmlessness, and Honesty (HHH) remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods often optimize for individual alignment dimensions in isolation, leading to trade-offs and inconsistent behavior. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer modularity, they suffer from poorly calibrated routing, limiting their effectiveness in alignment tasks. We propose TrinityX, a modular alignment framework that incorporates a Mixture of Calibrated Experts (MoCaE) within the Transformer architecture. TrinityX leverages separately trained experts for each HHH dimension, integrating their outputs through a calibrated, task-adaptive routing mechanism that combines expert signals into a unified, alignment-aware representation. Extensive experiments on three standard alignment benchmarks—Alpaca (Helpfulness), BeaverTails (Harmlessness), and TruthfulQA (Honesty)—demonstrate that TrinityX outperforms strong baselines, achieving relative improvements of 32.5% in win rate, 33.9% in safety score, and 28.4% in truthfulness. In addition, TrinityX reduces memory usage and inference latency by over 40% compared to prior MoE-based approaches. Ablation studies highlight the importance of calibrated routing, and cross-model evaluations confirm TrinityX’s generalization across diverse LLM backbones. Ourcode is available at: https://github.com/gskgautam/TrinityX
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2025
Subtitle of host publicationthe 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing : proceedings of the Conference
Place of PublicationKerrville, TX
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Pages29723-29734
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9798891763326
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2025
Event30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025 - Suzhou, China
Duration: 4 Nov 2025 → 9 Nov 2025

Conference

Conference30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025
Country/TerritoryChina
CitySuzhou
Period4/11/25 → 9/11/25

Bibliographical note

Alternative title of the host publication: "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing"

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