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Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models
Utkarsh Agarwal, Monojit Choudhury
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Status: succeeded | Model: Gemma-4-26B-A4B | Prompt: intel-v1 | Confidence: 95%
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Summary
This paper investigates ethical preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) by introducing a multilingual dataset of 12,000 ethical dilemmas covering conflicts between Honesty, Justice, and Autonomy. The authors benchmark GPT-5-mini and Llama-3.2 models, finding that while frontier models have inherent biases, smaller models can be aligned via fine-tuning (SFT/DPO). A key contribution is a task vector transfer method that isolates value preferences by orthogonalizing them against instruction-following vectors, enabling preference reversal without retraining.
Entities (14)
Relation Signals (6)
Ethical Dilemma Dataset ā coversconflictsbetween ā Honesty, Justice, Autonomy
confidence 98% Ā· dataset of two-option dilemmas covering pairwise three value conflicts: Honesty vs. Justice, Justice vs. Autonomy, and Autonomy vs. Honesty
Llama 3.2-1B ā exhibitsbias ā first-option_bias
confidence 95% Ā· The Llama-3.2-1/3B models exhibit strong first-option bias
Direct Preference Optimization ā removesbias ā first-option_bias
confidence 94% Ā· Direct Preference Optimization fine-tuning effectively remove this bias
Task Vector Transfer ā enables ā preference_reversal
confidence 93% Ā· this method is effective in isolating the direction of the specific value preference that can successfully be used to conduct task arithmetic to obtain a model with the opposite stance
GPT-5-mini ā exhibitsbiastowards ā Honesty
confidence 92% Ā· Benchmarking on GPT-5-mini reveals that it consistently favors Honesty over Autonomy
Task Vector Transfer ā orthogonalizesagainst ā instruction_following_vector
confidence 91% Ā· we orthogonalize it with respect to the general instruction following vector
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Abstract
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications that must weigh clashing moral values, yet even strong models exhibit hidden biases and brittle instruction-following across languages. We introduce a 12,000-instance dataset of two-option dilemmas covering pairwise three value conflicts: Honesty vs. Justice, Justice vs. Autonomy, and Autonomy vs. Honesty, along with their translations into Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese, to probe cross-lingual behavior. Benchmarking on GPT-5-mini reveals that it consistently favors Honesty over Autonomy across all five languages when no policy is given. The Llama-3.2-1/3B models exhibit strong first-option bias; however, both plain fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization fine-tuning effectively remove this bias, increasing accuracy to greater than 98%. In order to decouple the effect of learning correlations in the dataset from abstract values, we propose a task vector transfer based experiment where after computing the task vectors for a direction of value preference we orthogonalize it with respect to the general instruction following vector. Our experiment shows that this method is effective in isolating the direction of the specific value preference that can successfully be used to conduct task arithmetic to obtain a model with the opposite stance.
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- Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21094v1
- Canonical: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21094v1
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Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models Utkarsh Agarwal 1 Monojit Choudhury 1 Abstract Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications that must weigh clash- ing moral values, yet even strong models exhibit hidden biases and brittle instruction-following across languages. We introduce a 12,000-instance dataset of two-option dilemmas covering pairwise three value conflicts: Honesty vs. Justice, Jus- tice vs. Autonomy, and Autonomy vs. Honesty, along with their translations into Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese, to probe cross-lingual be- havior. Benchmarking on GPTā5-MINI reveals that it consistently favors Honesty over Auton- omy across all five languages when no policy is given. The Llama-3.2-1/3B models exhibit strong first-option bias; however, both plain fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization fine-tuning effectively remove this bias, increasing accuracy to greater than 98%. In order to decouple the ef- fect of learning correlations in the dataset from abstract values, we propose a task vector trans- fer based experiment where after computing the task vectors for a direction of value preference we orthogonalize it with respect to the general in- struction following vector. Our experiment shows that this method is effective in isolating the di- rection of the specific value preference that can successfully be used to conduct task arithmetic to obtain a model with the opposite stance. 1. Introduction Large Language Models (LLMs) are already embedded in systems that moderate content, draft policies, and offer per- sonal advice, all of which demand morally-sensitive judge- ments (Weidinger et al., 2021; Bubeck et al., 2023). Yet even frontier models reveal hidden value preferences and 1 Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Correspondence to:Utkarsh Agarwal <Utkarsh.Agarwal@mbzuai.ac.ae>. Pluralistic Alignment Workshop @ ICML 2026, Seoul, South Korea. Copyright 2026 by the author(s). Figure 1. An Ethical Dilemma scenario where an agent is present and is faced with a question and two options. Both options are virtuous and there isnāt a right answer without an associated ethical stance. brittle instruction-following, which vary across languages, while smaller, open-source checkpoints such as the Llama family fare still worse out-of-the-box (Agarwal et al., 2024). Prior multilingual ethics research has centred on cultural or demographic stereotypes and toxicity, leaving direct con- flicts between universal moral principles largely untested. Objectives. This paper investigates whether compact LLMs (1B-3B) can learn an implicit value preference from an ethical dilemma based dataset. Beyond this, we focus on modular preference: Can the preference information learned during alignment be isolated and reused by manipulation of the modelās weights to change these priorities on demand without retraining? This is also a theoretically interesting question because in order to decouple the effect of learning correlations in the dataset from abstract values, we propose a task vector transfer based experiment where after com- puting the task vectors for a direction of value preference we orthogonalize it with respect to the general instruction following vector. In order to probe along these questions, we construct a suite of ethical dilemmas (will be defined more formally in Sec 2) by creating situations that pit two of the three fundamental and universal values ā namely Honesty, Justice, and Autonomy ā against each other, leading to three pairwise moral dilemmas: Honesty vs. Justice (henceforth referred to as AB), Justice vs. Autonomy (BC) and Autonomy vs. 1 arXiv:2609.21094v1 [cs.CL] 17 Sep 2026 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models Honesty (CA), yielding a compact but expressive dataset for training and testing for value adherence. Given an ethical stance or policy, i.e., a value preference, each dilemma has a unique resolution. The dilemmas are available in 5 languages ā Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish, and Hindi ā making this the first of its kind comprehensive multilingual parallel dataset of ethical dilemmas. Figure 1 shows an example of an ethical dilemma and policy. Policy Adherence experiments. We conduct both in- context learning experiments with GPTā5-MINI , where the policies are stated in the prompt, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) experiments (Hu et al., 2021; Rafailov et al., 2023) with Llama-3.2 (1B/3B). We observe that out- of-the-box models struggle to follow in-context policies and are found to have their own biases that are sometimes value- oriented, and sometimes positional (the relative position of resolution options in the prompt). However, with PEFT training, even small models are able to learn value pref- erences efficiently and accurately beyond the word-based correlations, as is established through testing of the models on an out-of-domain human-annotated gold dataset. Task-vector transfer.A central contribution of this work is a lightweight task-vector-based (Ilharco et al., 2023) pol- icy reversal strategy that not only gives us practical advan- tages of modularity, but also demonstrates an important theoretical fact that abstract notions of values can indeed be represented as a model-specific vector that is decoupled from the wordings of the training templates. We extract a preference direction from a policy-aligned model check- point, estimate and subtract instruction-only components to isolate a preference vector, and subtract this vector, scaled by small mixing weights, to reverse the preference direction (e.g., Honesty over Justice to Justice over Honesty). Empiri- cally, this preserves most of the utility of full PEFT while enabling on-demand preference changes in line with value pluralism. Quite curiously, we also observe that unlike pref- erence reversal, we do not observe reliable transitive compo- sition under this task-vector procedure: the corresponding preference vectors are nearly orthogonal in weight space. This suggests that simple linear task arithmetic may be suf- ficient for preference reversal but insufficient for chaining value relations in this setting. Contributions. (1) We formalize what a dilemma consti- tutes and create a dataset over three value pairs for evalu- ating ethical stance adherence. (2) Evidence that compact models trained with LoRA (SFT/DPO) can learn stable ethical policies and shed position bias, whereas instruction- only prompting on larger frontier models remains brittle. (3) A simple task-vector method that successfully isolates and transfers preference information, enabling switching of value orderings at inference time without the need for retraining, while retaining a large fraction of full fine-tune performance. (4) Validation beyond generated dataset via a held-out, human-authored gold set, confirming that the learned policies do generalize. 2. Background Early alignment studies report that GPT-4 can apply explicit moral āpoliciesā in English (Rao et al., 2023), yet follow-up work finds value-specific biases and degraded consistency when prompts switch to lower-resource languages (Agar- wal et al., 2024). More broadly, recent works have shown the ability of LLMs to understand human ethics and per- form ethical reasoning tasks (Hendrycks et al., 2023), and prompt-based studies suggest that frontier models both ex- hibit inherent ethical biases and can be steered to follow explicit moral stances (Rao et al., 2023; Zhou et al., 2024). These findings are commonly probed using ethical dilem- mas, which offer a unique window into ethical reasoning by pitting multiple ethical principles against each other. Despite the apparent steerability of large models, in-context instructions remain brittle: small changes in wording or example order can flip decisions and re-surface position bias (Schick et al., 2021). This brittleness is exacerbated cross-lingually, where an LLMās capability drops sharply outside high-resource languages (Wang et al., 2024; Ahuja et al., 2023). In particular, Agarwal et al. (2024) revealed pronounced language-dependent biases on ethical resolu- tion tasks, echoing the foreign-language effect in human cognition (Costa et al., 2014). At the same time, smaller openly available models (1Bā3B parameters) are far cheaper to fine-tune and deploy on device (Dubey et al., 2024; Taori et al., 2023), but their ethical behaviour and cross-lingual robustness remain largely unexplored. Finally, work on value pluralism argues that alignment should accommodate conflicting human values rather than collapse to a single axis determined by a model creator. Motivated by these gaps, we study ethical alignment and modularity in LLMs through the lens of resolving ethical dilemmas under explicit moral stances. Definition 2.1. (Ethical Stance) A partial ordering over ethical principles,S = (v i āŖ° v j āŖ° ...)withv i ,v j ,...ā V . V is the universal set of all ethical principles. Definition 2.2. (Ethical Dilemma) A tupleD = (T ,R,S), whereTis the text describing a scenario with an agent who is faced with a question and has to make some decision.R is a list of options that the agent has as possible resolutions. S is an ethical stance that the agent is supposed to follow. For simplicity, we take two values at a time in our stance and hence have two possible resolutions inR. One option aligns with our stanceS = (v A ā» v B )while the other aligns to 2 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models the opposing stance Ģ S = (v B ā» v A ) (Example Fig 1). We create a dataset based on this formulation and evaluate our hypotheses. Firstly, we investigate whether a binary stanceS = (v A ā» v B )is learnable without being explicitly specified. We determine if this can be learned by small LLMs when provided(T ,R)pairs with the correct option inR as the ground truth. Fine-tuning. LoRA and related PEFT methods adapt LLMs with a small number of trainable parameters, making supervised alignment practical on compact backbones (Hu et al., 2021) with a small amount of training data. Alongside SFT, we also test Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which optimizes policies directly from pairwise preferences without an explicit reward model or RL fine-tuning (Rafailov et al., 2023). Both these methods have been used extensively to train pretrained models without needing much compute. We also investigate the modularity of these learned stances. We hypothesize that the learned representation of a stance is modular in the sense that the partial order relations between values is recoverable and reusable through direct manipula- tion of a modelās representation through its weights. We test this in two stages: testing invertibility by isolation of preference vectors in the model weights; and testing transitivity of these representations. First we hypothesize that we can get a model with the inverse stance Ģ S from a model trained on data for stanceS. We work in the weight space for this with the objective of isolating a stance vector which when reversed would lead to the desired model. Task Vector Arithmetic. This was proposed by Ilharco et al. (2023) where they treated the weight difference be- tween a base and fine-tuned model,ā, as a task vector that can be added to other checkpoints. Follow-up work revealed interference when vectors encode overlapping skills, break- ing commutativity and transitivity (Ortiz-Jimenez et al., 2023). To curb this interference, Gargiulo et al. (2025) project each delta onto a task-specific orthogonal basis, an idea we adopt by separating instruction and preference di- rections before recombination. After we demonstrate that this stance only vector can be extracted, we test it for transitive chaining of values. Given S 1 : (v i ā» v j )andS 2 : (v j ā» v k ), we check whether similar task arithmetic get us a model which can resolve dilemmas for the stance S 3 : (v i ā» v k ). 3. Dataset This section underlines the process of creating our dataset of ethical dilemmas, detailing all the design choices and processes. We use the definition of an ethical dilemma as formulated in Section 2. We have a situation as described inTwherein the agent has to make a decision out of the two listed options in R. The situation is such that each of the options is supported by an ethical principle, meaning that forcing a choice neces- sarily sacrifices one value in favour of another. Because itās a conflict of two values, both of which are positive virtues, neither option can be deemed objectively ācorrectā unless a stance is stated that needs to be followed. This stance here is a strict ordering of the two principles involved. 3.1. Ethics Principles We instantiate value conflict using three principles com- monly used across ethical frameworks: A: Trustworthiness & Honesty, B: Basic Justice/Fairness, and C: Respect for Autonomy. We chose only three principles in the study to keep it feasible as we need a dataset for each pair. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive set of ethical principles but a valid subset of a universal setV. We just need that these three principles should be well defined and distinct which is shown by their inclusion in multiple widely ac- cepted ethics codes (Colero, 2021; Varkey, 2021; American Psychological Association, 2017). This set spans three widely recognized dimensions: truthful- ness, equitable treatment, and individual agency. It yields three independent stances (A ā» B,B ā» CandC ā» A) that isolate distinct tensions without inflating prompt length or annotation complexity. Our claims are therefore limited to model behaviour under this explicit operationalization. The three labels provide stable and intelligible anchors for dilemma construction and evaluation, while keeping the study focused on how models respond when these specific values come into con- flict. We use these three pairs to construct the dilemmas for training and testing. Each dilemma created would present one ordered pair: AB, BC, or CA; and ask the model to choose an outcome corresponding to the higher-priority value (e.g. tell the whole truth over respecting someoneās self-determination). 3.2. Dataset creation The dataset consists of ethical dilemmas, where each dilemma involves an agent in the scenario having to decide between two options. The story presents a conflict between two values (say,v A andv B ). Each choice is supported by an ethical value and hence is not inherently better than the other. The expected output is in the form of a choice be- tween the two possible actions, whichever choice prioritizes value A over B, i.e., following the stance S = (v A ā» v B ). To ensure diversity in the scenarios, we create an exhaus- tive list of 20 scenarios in which a person might face an 3 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models ethical dilemma. These scenarios were manually created for maximum variability and coverage of social settings. Scenarios span everyday domains like family, healthcare, workplace, social media, etc; full list will be provided in the Supplementary material. To generate the data points, we take these scenarios one at a time as part of the generation prompt and get the dilemmas created using the OpenAI GPT-4o model API 1 . We are using a set of three ethical principles for our experi- ments from the complete list - Trustworthiness and Honesty; Basic Justice (being fair); and Respect for the autonomy of others. We form three separate tasks by pitting them against each other two at a time and create datasets separately for each stance (S Aā»B , S Bā»C and S Cā»A ). For each stance, we iterate through the list of scenarios and generate 200 sample dilemmas each, with 10 API calls generating 20 dilemmas each, totaling 4000 samples for each value pair. We divide this dataset into a 3200-sample train set, a 400-sample dev set, and a 400-sample test set. Each created sample hasT, i.e., the story/scenario and the question facing the agent, andR, i.e., the two options corre- sponding to the two values. An example of the generated data point is as follows: āindexā: 1, āstoryā: āA teenager discovers that their younger sibling is frequently lying about completing their homework. This has started to impact the siblingās grades, but the sibling admits they are struggling and worries about getting in trouble with the parents. The teenager feels torn because they know honesty is crucial but also want to be fair by not punishing their sibling for something they are struggling with.ā, āquestionā: āShould the teenager tell their parents about the siblingās dishonesty, or keep the secret to give the sibling a chance to improve?ā, āoptionsā: [āTell the parents and encourage an honest dis- cussion about the siblingās struggles.ā, āKeep the secret to allow the sibling an opportunity to improve without parental interference.ā] Option A is considered correct when the stance is that ātrust- worthiness and honestyā is preferred over ārespect for au- tonomyā, while Option B is considered correct when the stance is reversed. We picked data points randomly from the dataset for vali- dation and to ensure that the quality of the generated data was acceptable. Apart from some minor JSON formatting issues, we found multiple cases of samples where either one of the options did not align properly with the specified value 1 https://openai.com/api/ or the two options were incorrectly labelled. Analysis of the generated data with human annotators is covered later in Section 3.4. To reduce noise, we used Gemini-3-Flash-Preview 2 as an automated validator. The validator checked whether each option aligned with the intended value label and whether the option labels matched the target stance. It proposed edits for 4,055 of 12,000 samples. These edits included label corrections, wording changes to make the value conflict clearer, and minor formatting fixes. We use only the post- validation version of the dataset in all experiments. 3.3. Translation To probe multilingual robustness, we translate each English dilemma into Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese using Google Translate 3 , with a small sample checked by back- translation and native-speaker inspection. Train/test splits are parallel across languages. We treat these as controlled linguistic variants, not culturally localized dilemmas; thus our multilingual results test robustness to language transfer, but not cross-cultural equivalence of moral interpretation. 3.4. Human Gold Test Set and Annotation To check the robustness of the models trained on our data and test its generalisability, we created a human-generated set of ethical dilemmas for the three tasks. A group of 6 peers helped create 20 dilemmas each for the three pairs, along with their choices for possible actions. We then asked the annotators to evaluate the quality of these generations to ensure a higher quality of dilemmas. Each data point was annotated by 2 individual annotators. We added a mix of 10 samples per task to them from the test set created previously to see what is the quality of those samples. For each dilemma, the annotators had to mark whether they thought the sample was appropriate and labelled correctly, along with a confidence score for their response. For the gold test set, we kept the samples where both anno- tators agreed that it was a valid and relevant dilemma, and updated the sample after discussions which had a disagree- ment before. 4. Methodology 4.1. Baseline Models GPTā5-MINIWe query the public API in zero-shot mode and low reasoning with the system instruction āHere is a situation that needs to be analysed. The story ... Answer only as āAā or āBā ā. This serves as a strong, proprietary 2 https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api 3 https://py-googletrans.readthedocs.io/ 4 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models TaskABTaskBCTaskCA English56.8%69.5%30.0% Hindi64.5%73.5%27.2% Spanish58.8%68.5%29.5% Arabic60.5%67.5%28.0% Chinese62.0%71.5%29.2% Table 1. Baseline preference of GPTā5-MINI . For each task, we see how often the model chooses the option whose guiding principle is listed first in the task. ForTaskij, we report here the percentage of times the model chose the option preferring value i over value j. TaskABTaskBCTaskCA S1S2S1S2S1S2 English85.872.898.899.298.095.0 Hindi 61.857.095.588.275.090.2 Spanish 88.070.099.299.598.893.5 Arabic79.872.299.599.894.292.5 Chinese92.291.899.897.297.096.5 Table 2. Prompt-steering on GPTā5-MINI āStance-1ā in- structs the model to follow the default order (e.g.v A ā» v B forTaskAB); āStance-2ā explicitly instructs the reverse order (v B ā» v A ). Numbers in the table show the accuracy of the model. reference point for the modelās inherent value alignment. As we do not specify or expect any value preference here, there is no metric that can help mark the responses as cor- rect/incorrect. The responses by the model show modelās inherent preference of one value over the other (Table: 1). We also conducted an experiment by adding a stance to the prompt, saying āYou should always value āvalue Aā over āvalue Bāā. Here we do have a desired answer and thus a have way to evaluate the accuracy of our language model. (Table: 2) Llama-3.2 1B and 3BWe use the META-LLAMA/LLAMA- 3.2-1B,3Bmodels available on theHuggingFace Hub 4 . We shall be using these models for most of our experiments as they are open-source and smaller sized. For the baseline, we evaluate them using a similar prompt to gauge zero-shot value bias and instruction following abil- ity. We found that these models do not reliably map the dilemmas to the intended value-conditioned choice under our prompting setup. The value preference is near 50% and in majority of the cases the models pick the option listed first. There is no bias that can be observed here and this can mainly be attributed to them not being able to perform ethical reasoning. 4 https://huggingface.co/meta-llama 4.2. Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning We adopt LoRA (Hu et al., 2021) to avoid full-model up- dates and efficiently train on available hardware. Only the Wq,Wk, andWvprojection matrices in every transformer layer of the language models are augmented with rank-r adapters (r = 4, scaling factorα = 8for the 1B parameter model andr = 16,α = 16for the 3B parameter model). Adapters are initialised with a standard normal distribution and merged back into the base weights for inference. Training ConfigurationFine-tuning is performed on the train splits (3200 samples). Key hyperparameters used were: ⢠Learning rate = 2e-4, weight decay = 0.01. ⢠Batch size = 8. ⢠Number of epochs = 5, max sequence length = 512. 4.3. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) We also train models with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) (Rafailov et al., 2023), which directly maximizes the log-odds that the policy assigns higher likelihood to a preferred response than to a rejected one, relative to a fixed reference model. For each dilemma(x)and stance (e.g., Aā»B), we form a preference tuple(x,y + ,y ā )wherey + is the option consistent with the taskās priority andy ā is the opposite. Completions are short, single-token answers (āAā/āBā) and no chain-of-thought is used. Training configuration. We train on the same language- specific train splits as SFT (§4.2). The models are trained with LoRA adapters identical to §4.2 (attention projections W q , W k , W v ; same rank and scaling). This keeps the pa- rameter budget and architecture comparable to SFT. Other parameters used: max sequence length=512, batch size =8, number of epochs=5 and the DPO regularization parameter,beta = 0.1. We ran this with three different seeds (seedā0, 1, 2) and report mean±std over them. 4.4. Task Vector for Preference Alignment In this section, we describe our approach to creating models for stances without explicitly training for them, but by using task vector arithmetic on other previously finetuned models. Here, the objective is to get a model with a preferred stance Bā»A without any training. We have the model with prefer- ence Aā»B, and want to get our desired model from it. We started by isolating the task vector for theS = (Aā» B) model, reversing it, and adding to the base model: ā S = Īø S ā Īø 0 ; ā Ģ S =āā S ; Īø Ģ S = ā Ģ S + Īø 0 5 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models Algorithm 1 Value Alignment for Unseen Policy: Task Vectors Input: Base modelĪø 0 ; preference trained checkpointĪø S 1 ; instruction-only task vectors ā S 2 , ā Ģ S 2 Parameter: Mixing weights γ 1 , γ 2 Output: Model following stance Ģ S 1 = (v B ā» v A ): Īø Ģ S 1 1: ā S 1 ā Īø S 1 ā Īø 0 Preference Direction 2: ā instr ā 1 2 ā S 2 + ā Ģ S 2 Extract Instruction-Only Direction 3: αā ā S 1 Ā·ā instr ā„ā instr ā„ 2 ā S 1 prefāonly ā ā S 1 ā α ā instr Remove Instructional Bias 4: Īø Ģ S 1 ā Īø 0 + γ 1 ā instr ā γ 2 ā S 1 prefāonly Final Model for stance Ģ S 5: return Īø Ģ S 1 The model generated this way produced invalid and garbage responses. Since the base model had a strong position bias and fine-tuning helped the model learn to follow the output instructions properly, we believe that the task vector con- tains two main components: an instruction-following vector and a preference vector. Reversing the whole task vector also negatively affects the instruction-following direction, leading to degraded generations. This serves as a failed naive vector-reversal baseline: directly negating the full task vector degraded output formatting and instruction-following, which motivates separating the instruction-following com- ponent from the preference component. We therefore need to isolate the preference vector and reverse only that part. To isolate this instruction vector and subsequently the pref- erence vector, we propose a method as shown in Algorithm 1. This approach additionally requires a pair of models fine-tuned on opposing preferences to approximate the in- struction vector. Using this orthogonalization process, we are able to successfully isolate the preference vector for our stance. We have two hyperparameters hereγ 1 andγ 2 that need to be set correctly. For this, we use grid search while evaluating candidate models on the dev set. The ranges were set as γ 1 ā [0, 3]andγ 2 ā [0, 2]. We first do a coarse search with a step size of 0.3, and then a finer search in the vicinity of the best point found with a step of 0.1. Since we only need to do inference for evaluation for each point, this is a quick process. ABBCCA en es hi ar zh-cn Language 0.951.000.90 0.951.000.95 0.901.000.95 0.951.001.00 0.901.000.95 Llama-3.2-1B ABBCCA 0.951.001.00 0.901.000.95 1.001.000.95 0.951.001.00 0.951.000.95 Llama-3.2-3B 0.80 0.85 0.90 0.95 1.00 Accuracy Figure 2. SFT Accuracy: Accuracy of models on the gold test data for each language and task trained on corresponding training data. Task AB implies that the modelās task was to prefer value A over value B. A, B, C are as defined in §3.1. ABBCCA en es hi ar zh-cn Language 1.001.000.90 0.951.000.85 0.901.000.90 0.901.000.90 0.901.000.90 Llama-3.2-1B ABBCCA 0.951.001.00 0.901.000.95 0.901.001.00 0.901.000.95 0.951.000.95 Llama-3.2-3B 0.80 0.85 0.90 0.95 1.00 Accuracy Figure 3. DPO Accuracy: Accuracy of models trained using DPO on the gold test set. Task AB implies that the modelās task was to prefer value A over value B. A, B, C are as defined in §3.1. 4.5. Inference At test time, we prompt the model with the dilemma fol- lowed by āReturn only āAā or āBāā. The full prompt is avail- able in the Supplementary Material. The stance is not explic- itly stated at inference time. If the output contains multiple characters, we consider the first occurrence of standalone āAā or āBā for evaluation. 4.6. Evaluation Metric We report Accuracy across languages and tasks to quantify the percentage of times the right option was chosen. Since the task here is to select the appropriate option as per a stance, we have a right answer as the ground truth. However for the baseline, there isnāt any right answer and we want to observe the internal stance of the model. We also look at the number of times the first or the second option was chosen to track position bias. The option order is randomized to avoid reward hacking. 5. Results We have four sets of experiments: (i) zero-shot behaviour of the baseline models (§5.1); (i) language-specific LoRA SFT and DPO training; evaluation on a held-out, human-written gold set (§5.2); and (i) alignment steering via task-vector transfer (§5.3). 6 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models ABBCCA 1B BC_CB 94 AB_BA 97 BC_CB 84 BC_CB 100 AB_BA 95 BC_CB 85 en ABBCCA BC_CB 80 AB_BA 96 BC_CB 80 BC_CB 90 AB_BA 100 BC_CB 95 hi ABBCCA BC_CB 84 AB_BA 93 BC_CB 89 BC_CB 90 AB_BA 100 BC_CB 90 ar ABBCCA BC_CB 88 AB_BA 95 BC_CB 89 BC_CB 90 AB_BA 100 BC_CB 85 es ABBCCA BC_CB 89 AB_BA 97 BC_CB 82 BC_CB 90 AB_BA 100 BC_CB 95 zh-cn ABBCCA 3B BC_CB 99 AB_BA 100 BC_CB 98 BC_CB 95 AB_BA 100 BC_CB 100 en ABBCCA CA_AC 85 CA_AC 99 BC_CB 99 CA_AC 90 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 100 hi ABBCCA CA_AC 96 CA_AC 99 BC_CB 98 CA_AC 95 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 95 ar ABBCCA CA_AC 97 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 99 CA_AC 90 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 95 es ABBCCA BC_CB 96 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 99 BC_CB 95 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 95 zh-cn 50 60 70 80 90 100 Row 1: On test set Row 2: On human gold set Figure 4. Task-vector transfer efficiency. Numbers show the accuracy of the task-vector model expressed as a percentage of the accuracy achieved by full LoRA fine-tuning (higher is better). The x-label is the model that is being used to reverse its preference (for instance, AB is being used to create a model that prefers B over A). In a box, BCCB indicates that BC and CB models were used to create the instruction vector. For each model, the first row is the result on the held out test set while the second row has the recovered accuracy percent on the human gold set. 5.1. Baselines and Prompt Steering Without any preference instruction, GPTā5-MINI shows a visible bias on the Justice versus Autonomy conflict (Task BC), selecting the justice-aligned choice inā70 % of cases across all five languages. The bias is similar (ā70%) for the CA pair, i.e., preferring Honesty over Autonomy and largely language-independent (Table 1). It weakly prefers Honesty over Justice. When explicitly prompted to resolve dilemmas in a given order (āprompt-based alignmentā), GPTā5-MINI is able to reverse its default bias. Accuracy for reversed priorities, which are against the baseline bias that we observed is quite high too. This performance is noticeably poorer for Hindi where it performs poorly compared to other languages. In TaskAB, the accuracy in selecting Honesty over Justice falls from 64.5% to 61.8% even when being asked to use this policy, highlighting confusion in the model. This con- firms that surface instructions alone cannot always reliably enforce required value preferences (See Table 2) Both the Llama-1B and 3B models behave nearly at random and exhibit strong position bias, often selecting the first option regardless of the intended value preference. 5.2. LoRA SFT and DPO Training Fine-tuning with LoRA SFT removes the strong position bias observed in the base Llama checkpoints. On the held- out synthetic test set, SFT achieves more than 98% accuracy across all value pairs and languages (Appendix Fig 5). More importantly, the same checkpoints achieve above 90% accu- racy on the human-written gold set (Fig 2), suggesting that the learned stance is not limited to the synthetic templates. DPO shows a comparable trend on both the gold set (Figure 3) and the synthetic test set (Appendix Fig 6), with only a small drop relative to SFT. 5.3. Task-Vector for Alignment Steering Fig 4 visualizes the effectiveness of task-vector transfer in the main paper, while Appendix Fig 8 shows the extended comparison. Task-vector steering preservesā„93 % of fine-tuned per- formance on one task (BC) andā„80 % on the other two pairs in the 1B model, while retainingā„98% of full fine- tune performance in two tasks and a comparatively lower value of 85% on the third task, only in Hindi for the 3B model. This performance is also quite resilient to the choice of models used to extract the instruction-only vector. This demonstrates strongly that preference direction isolation is possible with this method and it can help swap the modelās learned stance with minimal extra compute. We also show the performance on the gold sets in the second rows which are comparable to the results on the test set, showing that the models produced here do generalize. Numbers are reported for the best combination ofγ 1 andγ 2 found using the dev set. The numbers reported in the table are on the held out test set. Overall, task-vector arithmetic provides a compute-light way to flip value orderings without sacrificing much performance. Optimal task vector perfor- mance occurs with moderate gamma scaling (γ 1 ā [0.3, 0.8] and γ 2 ā [0.3, 0.7]) (Plot in the Supplementary Material). 7 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models 6. Observations Baseline behaviours. Without any preference instruc- tions, GPTā5-MINI displays a marked bias for the Justiceā» Autonomy stance (Task BC), choosing the Justice-aligned option in roughly 70% of cases across all languages (Ta- ble 1). It similarly prefers Honesty over Autonomy and has a weaker bias for Honesty over Justice. In-context stance steering is able to successfully modify the modelās behaviour as intended. It is able to follow the given stances even when it is the opposite to the modelās bias. It performs the poorest for Hindi which is the lowest resource language of them. In the first task, its chance of choosing the Honesty based option over Justice drops from the non steered case despite being prompted in the same direction (Table 2). Ethical reasoning ability of the model does vary significantly with language. Zero-shot Llama-3.2 checkpoints.Both 1B and 3B mod- els behave nearly at random and exhibit strong positional biases, i.e., choosing Option-1 regardless of its ethical value (or Option-2 in some cases, primarily with Arabic). These raw checkpoints do not reliably solve the forced-choice value-preference task under the zero-shot prompt (§5.1). LoRA: SFT and DPO. Five-epoch LoRA fine-tuning eliminates position bias and drives accuracy toā„ 98%on all tasks across languages. We get the same results with DPO. These methods are therefore extremely effective and perform near perfect on the test sets. Human gold-set generalization. On 60 human-written dilemmas (Figures 2,3) the fine-tuned checkpoints largely maintain high performance, providing evidence that the learned policy transfers to unseen narrative styles without relying on spurious textual cues. Task-vector transfer. The proposed vector-arithmetic recipe swaps value orderings without retraining, retaining ā„ 97%of full fine-tune accuracy in the 3B model on all tasks and languages except AB with Hindi. The 1B model gets quite high retention as well with worse performances for tasks AB and CA. These performances are replicated on the human gold sets as well. Optimal transfer occurs with moderate scaling (0.3ā¤Ī³ instr ⤠0.8, 0.3ā¤Ī³ pref ⤠0.7;), suggesting that preference information is largely orthogonal to instruction-following ability. This performance is not reproduced in the case where we test for transitivity in values. We see near random results from the models after extensive grid search for the coefficients of the preference vectors. We therefore check for the reason and found out that the preference vectors are orthogonal in the weight space. When we measure the angle between the vectors corresponding to different stances using cosine similarity, the angles between preference vectors are above 80 ⦠. This negative result is important for interpreting the scope of the method. Preference reversal appears feasible as a local operation on a learned binary stance, but successful reversal does not imply that independently learned pairwise value directions compose transitively. Thus, our results support limited modularity rather than a fully compositional linear geometry of values. 6.1. Limitations Our results should be interpreted within the controlled set- ting studied here. First, the benchmark focuses on forced- choice dilemmas over three selected ethical principles, so it evaluates stance adherence rather than general moral reason- ing or explanation quality. Second, most training and test examples are LLM generated and validated, and machine- translated; while we include human auditing and a human- written gold set, the dataset may still contain generator specific artifacts. Third, the human gold set is small, so its results provide preliminary evidence of transfer rather than definitive out-of-distribution generalization. Fourth, our ex- periments are limited to Llama-3.2 1B and 3B checkpoints, and it remains open whether the same behavior scales to larger models. Finally, the task-vector method does not eliminate all training requirements: it relies on already fine- tuned preference checkpoints and dev-set tuning of mixing coefficients. The failure of transitive composition further suggests that our results support local preference reversal, not a fully linear geometry of ethical values. 7. Conclusion We introduced a controlled benchmark of 12,000 two-option moral dilemmas across three value pairs, using LLM-based validation for the synthetic data, a small human audit of synthetic samples, and a separate human-written gold set. Experiments on 1B and 3B LLAMA-3.2 checkpoints yield four key take-aways: 1.Compact models can learn stable ethical policies. Five-epoch LoRA adapters trained on 80 % of the benchmark achieveā„ 98%accuracy on the value pairs. Crucially, the same checkpoints reachā„ 90%on the held-out, human-written gold set, confirming that they generalize beyond synthetic wording and do not rely on surface heuristics. 2. Prompting alone is insufficient. Prompting improves stance adherence but remains uneven across value pairs and languages, especially for Hindi and for cases op- posing the modelās default tendencies. A purely instruc- tional steer cannot overturn entrenched biases even in GPTā5-MINI ; parameter-efficient fine-tuning is re- quired for robust policy shifts. 8 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models 3.Task-vector arithmetic isolates preference informa- tion. A single āpreference vectorā learned once can be added or subtracted at inference time, flipping value or- derings while retainingā„ 96 %of full fine-tune perfor- mance in most cases on the larger 3B model. This en- ables on-the-fly value pluralism: developers can swap or blend moral priorities without retraining or storing multiple model copies. More importantly, this shows that we can isolate prefer- ence vectors in the weight space of a finetuned model. 4.Human Validation underpins generalizability. A separately written gold set and a small human audit of synthetic examples provide evidence that the learned policies transfer beyond the original generation tem- plates, while also highlighting the need for broader human and cultural validation in future work. Taken together, our study supports the core claim that ethi- cal preference alignment can be both learnable and modular in compact language models. By operationalizing three widely used principles (Honesty, Justice, Autonomy) and instantiating them as pairwise ethical dilemmas in a fully parallel, multilingual benchmark, we make value conflict a controlled supervision signal rather than an underspecified prompt artifact. Across experiments, we find that out-of- the-box models exhibit hidden value and positional biases and that prompt-only stance steering remains brittle, espe- cially cross-lingually, whereas lightweight PEFT (LoRA SFT/DPO) reliably induces stable stance adherence that generalizes beyond synthetic templates to human-authored dilemmas. Finally, we show that the learned stance is not merely a byproduct of better instruction-following, but contains an isolatable preference direction in weight space: after sub- tracting instruction components, task-vector arithmetic can flip value orderings on demand with minimal loss in accu- racy, enabling practical value pluralism without retraining or maintaining multiple aligned copies. Code and data availability details are provided in Ap- pendix C. References Agarwal, U., Tanmay, K., Khandelwal, A., and Choud- hury, M. Ethical reasoning and moral value alignment of LLMs depend on the language we prompt them in. 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Zhou, J., Hu, M., Li, J., Zhang, X., Wu, X., King, I., and Meng, H. Rethinking machine ethics ā can llms perform moral reasoning through the lens of moral theories?, 2024. URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15399. 10 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models A. Prompt Structure for Evaluation Here is a sample prompt with the story, dilemma and options: Here is a situation that needs to be analysed. Story: A teenager discovers that their younger sibling is frequently lying about completing their homework. This has started to impact the siblingās grades, but the sibling admits they are struggling and worries about getting in trouble with the parents. The teenager feels torn because they know honesty is crucial but also wants to be fair by not punishing their sibling for something they are struggling with. Question: Should the teenager tell their parents about the siblingās dishonesty, or keep the secret to give the sibling a chance to improve? Options: A. Tell the parents and encourage an honest discussion about the siblingās struggles. B. Keep the secret to allow the sibling an opportunity to improve without parental interference. B. Scenarios for the Dilemmas An exhaustive list of scenarios in which ethical decisions could need to be made, providing diverse scenarios across interpersonal, social, professional, and global contexts, allowing for a broad exploration of ethical dilemmas 1. Family and Household 2. Friendships and Social Circles 3. Romantic and Partner Relationships 4. Community and Neighborhood 5. Civic and Social Responsibility 6. Social Media and Online Communities 7. Public and Shared Spaces 8. Educational and Mentorship Settings 9. Workplace and Professional Relationships 10. Healthcare and Medical Scenarios 11. Cultural and Religious Communities 12. Leisure and Recreational Settings 13. Environmental and Sustainability 14. Conflict and Mediation 15. Charity and Philanthropy 16. Technological and Digital Environments 17. Crisis or Emergency Settings 18. Legal and Regulatory Settings 19. Personal Morality and Lifestyle Choices 20. Media and Communications 11 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models C. Code and Data Availability A public repository for this project is available at mbzuai-nlp/geometry-of-values-task-vectors. We use this repository to release the dataset, prompts, preprocessing scripts, evaluation code, and task-vector steering code. The release will include the synthetic multilingual dilemma dataset, the human-written gold set, train/dev/test splits, and metadata describing the value pair, language, stance, option order, and split for each example. The repository will also document the dataset construction process, including LLM based generation, LLM based validation, machine translation, and human-written gold examples. D. Plots ABBCCA en es hi ar zh-cn Language 0.991.001.00 0.991.001.00 0.991.001.00 0.991.001.00 0.991.001.00 Llama-3.2-1B ABBCCA 0.991.001.00 1.001.001.00 0.991.001.00 1.001.001.00 0.991.001.00 Llama-3.2-3B 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98 0.99 1.00 Accuracy Figure 5. SFT Accuracy: Accuracy of models on the test data for each language and task trained on corresponding training data. Task AB implies that the modelās task was to prefer value A over value B. ABBCCA 0.95 0.96 0.97 0.98 0.99 1.00 Accuracy Llama-3.2-1B ABBCCA Llama-3.2-3B Language eneshiarzh-cn Figure 6. DPO Accuracy: Accuracy of models trained using DPO. Each language-task pair was trained with three different seeds. Task AB implies that the modelās task was to prefer value A over value B. 12 Geometry of Values: Task Vector Composition for Ethical Preference Alignment in Language Models 0.51.01.52.02.53.0 Gamma Instruction (gamma_instr) 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 1.25 1.50 1.75 Gamma Preference (gamma_pref) Point sizes scaled by test accuracy (Range: 81.5% - 99.8%) Scatter Plot: Gamma Parameters for High-Accuracy Experiments (Top 20th percentile, Point size Accuracy) 1B (n=19) 3B (n=29) Figure 7. Scatter plot of the optimumγ 1 (γ instr )andγ 2 (γ pref ). Only the top 80 percent of the points are shown, scaled by the test accuracy and with small random jitters to prevent overlapping and demonstrate the number of points there. ABBCCA 1B BC_CB 94 AB_BA 97 BC_CB 84 CA_AC 90 CA_AC 94 AB_BA 83 en ABBCCA BC_CB 80 AB_BA 96 BC_CB 80 CA_AC 71 CA_AC 62 AB_BA 80 hi ABBCCA BC_CB 84 AB_BA 93 BC_CB 89 CA_AC 72 CA_AC 78 AB_BA 82 ar ABBCCA BC_CB 88 AB_BA 95 BC_CB 89 CA_AC 82 CA_AC 73 AB_BA 73 es ABBCCA BC_CB 89 AB_BA 97 BC_CB 82 CA_AC 81 CA_AC 88 AB_BA 79 zh-cn ABBCCA 3B BC_CB 99 AB_BA 100 BC_CB 98 CA_AC 99 CA_AC 99 AB_BA 96 en ABBCCA CA_AC 85 CA_AC 99 BC_CB 99 BC_CB 79 AB_BA 98 AB_BA 93 hi ABBCCA CA_AC 96 CA_AC 99 BC_CB 98 BC_CB 94 AB_BA 99 AB_BA 96 ar ABBCCA CA_AC 97 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 99 BC_CB 95 AB_BA 99 AB_BA 96 es ABBCCA BC_CB 96 CA_AC 100 BC_CB 99 CA_AC 94 AB_BA 99 AB_BA 97 zh-cn 50 60 70 80 90 100 Task-Vector Accuracy as % of Finetune Accuracy: Row 1: 1B Row 2: 3B Figure 8. Task-vector transfer efficiency. Numbers show the accuracy of the task-vector model expressed as a percentage of the accuracy achieved by full LoRA fine-tuning (higher is better). The x-label is the model that is being used to reverse its preference (for instance, AB is being used to create a model that prefers B over A). In a box, BCCB indicates that BC and CB models were used to create the instruction vector. The better performing combination is placed above the other one. 13