Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is often treated as a capability-adaptation step, while alignment is attributed to later preference optimization or reinforcement learning. This separation is incomplete: when examples are scored and kept online during fine-tuning, the choice of which data to train on already changes the model's behavioral preferences.
arXiv:2607. 07023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is often treated as a capability-adaptation step, while alignment is attributed to later preference optimization or reinforcement learning.
arXiv:2607. 22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks.
arXiv:2510. 26707v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As LLMs occupy an increasingly important role in society, they are more and more confronted with questions that require them not only to draw on their general knowledge but also to align with certain human value systems.
arXiv:2609.36862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface...
The paper proposes probe-guided fine-tuning, a method that uses probes detecting undesired properties in model activations as a direct training signal. Experiments show that continuously updated probes reduce harmfulness and improve honesty while preserving utility, outperforming DPO and inference-time steering in safety-utility trade-offs and robustness to jailbreak and abliteration attacks. Importantly, the concepts remain linearly encoded after fine-tuning, maintaining monitorability.
arXiv:2606. 24014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed across increasingly diverse and high-stakes settings, model alignment must generalize beyond the tasks and domains seen during training.
arXiv:2607. 16240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Direct Alignment Algorithms (DAAs) such as DPO have become a common way to post-train and align LLMs with human preferences.
arXiv:2602.13576v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluation and alignment pipelines for large language models increasingly rely on LLM-based judges, whose behavior is guided by natural-langu...
Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface: a small amount of harmful data mixed into an othe...
Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment.
arXiv:2609.38860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning from human preferences is central to large language model (LLM) alignment, but human preference annotation is costly. Active preference lear...
arXiv:2608.31079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sycophantic agreement refers to a behavior in which language models excessively affirm the user, often at the cost of factual accuracy. Although sycoph...