The paper investigates how preference tuning—optimizing language models with explicit preference signals—behaves when applied to new domains. It systematically compares five alignment objectives and several adaptation strategies, such as target‑domain supervised fine‑tuning and pseudo‑labeling, across summarization, question‑answering helpfulness, and safety tasks. Results show that while pseudo‑labeling reduces domain‑shift degradation, it also causes mode collapse, highlighting a trade‑off between generalization and diversity.
arXiv:2607. 22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks.
arXiv:2509. 08022v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse human values is essential for safe and effective deployment, yet existing benchmarks often overlook cultural and demographic variation.
Aligning large language models to human preferences is crucial for real-world deployment but frequently incurs an alignment tax, leading to the catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained general capabilit...
arXiv:2607. 19243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual fluency, their internal knowledge representations remain disproportionately biased toward high-resource languages.
The paper proposes a method for culturally aligning large language models (LLMs) using soft prompt tuning optimized via Differential Evolution (DE). Unlike traditional fine‑tuning or reinforcement learning, this approach keeps model weights frozen and requires no preference data, instead leveraging aggregated survey scores from Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13). Experiments on four countries and four instruction‑tuned models show that DE‑optimized prompts reduce cultural discrepancy, improve agreement with the World Values Survey, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations by LLM judges.
arXiv:2609.00565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cultural fine-tuning has become the de facto paradigm for building culture-aware large language models (LLMs), yet existing optimization exclusively...
The paper introduces the task of predicting alignment generalization, which measures how fine‑tuning a language model to follow a specific value affects its behavior across a broad set of other values. Through a large‑scale study of 66 values, the authors show that representations derived from model activations when applying values in context outperform textual description‑based methods, achieving a correlation of 0.45 versus 0.05. They further demonstrate that these representations can predict downstream robustness and help construct a taxonomy of LLM values based on empirical generalization dynamics.
The paper introduces BALIGN, a balanced data selection strategy designed to reduce catastrophic forgetting—referred to as the alignment tax—in large language models during preference-based alignment. By analyzing preference optimization gradients, the authors identify three data-centric features that influence parameter drift: the reference model's log-probability margin, token length differences between chosen and rejected responses, and TF‑IDF similarity to general capability corpora. BALIGN aggregates these features into a composite risk score to filter out high-risk preference samples, thereby preserving foundational capabilities while maintaining alignment gains with minimal computational overhead.
arXiv:2606. 03165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The language used by digital chat assistants such as ChatGPT can diverge from human expectations (misalignment).
arXiv:2609.32717v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) alignment is intended to ensure that models remain helpful and safe, but its stability under input distributional...
arXiv:2509. 26169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Alignment of large language models remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
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.