How LLM Task-Adaptation Reshapes Alignment: A Multi-dimensional Study of Behavioral and Representational Drift
arXiv:2607. 22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks.
arXiv:2607. 22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks.
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:2603.18908v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Independently trained language models often learn compatible late-stage representations, despite differences in training objectives, architectures,...
arXiv:2605.01913v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vul...
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.
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:2608. 13069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly aligned to function as passive, sycophantic assistants.
arXiv:2608.29118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly harmful datasets can lead to misalignment broadly, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment (EM...
arXiv:2506.17871v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite their impressive capabilities, aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate outputs that lack diversity. What drives this cons...
arXiv:2601. 22313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rarely static and are frequently updated in practice.
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.
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.