arXiv AI

LLM Alignment--Utility Asymmetry under Semantic-Preserving Transformations

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Lost in Reordering: Structural Sensitivity of Multilingual LLMs under Semantics-Preserving Perturbations

The paper introduces IndicReStruct, a benchmark dataset comprising two variants—GSM8K-Reordered and GSM8K-Voice—derived from GSM8K to test multilingual LLMs on Hindi and Malayalam. It evaluates six state‑of‑the‑art LLMs under constrained constituent reordering and active‑passive voice transformation, finding consistent and significant drops in mathematical reasoning performance. Qualitative error analysis and residual‑stream activation patching reveal that failures often stem from disrupted entity‑quantity alignment, with intermediate transformer layers playing a key role in restoring reasoning.

By Karthika Nhayakkat, Rajat Verma, Maharaj Brahma, Vetcha Gnana Mahesh, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Rohit Saluja
arXiv AI
Aug 25

An Empirical Study on Preference Tuning Generalization and Diversity Under Domain Shift

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.

By Constantinos Karouzos, Xingwei Tan, Nikolaos Aletras
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Predicting Alignment Generalization with Value Representations

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.

By Andy Liu, Mehar Bhatia, Karolina Stanczak, Mona Diab, Vered Shwartz, Daniel Fried
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

PRISM: Transfer and Limits of Activation Interventions in Tool-Calling Language Models

PRISM is a framework that evaluates how activation interventions transfer across precision, languages, and model scales to mitigate unsafe tool‑calling behaviors in language models. By leveraging lower‑resource settings such as quantized NF4 labels and cross‑lingual transfer, PRISM demonstrates that alignment improvements can be achieved with minimal scenarios and that these gains transfer to held‑out languages and larger models. The study shows that auxiliary supervision from compressed models and multilingual data can effectively uncover and reduce hazardous tool‑calling behaviors across different model families.

By Giovana Kerche Bon\'as, Thales Sales Almeida, Marcelo da Silva Reis, Rodrigo Nogueira, Marcos Meideiros Raimundo