Emergent Misalignment Is Not Magical
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:2508. 06249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EM): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target domain.
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:2603. 07445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data.
arXiv:2512. 05518v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in the democratization of AI, yet their "open" nature introduces more avenues for malicious actors to misuse them for harmful purposes.
arXiv:2606. 19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms.
arXiv:2606. 04168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is fragile in part because it is often shallow: fine-tuning mainly reshapes the model's behavior near the first few output tokens.
arXiv:2607. 01859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching.
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...
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...
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...
Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching. We show that this creates an epistemic gap in which models confidently generate harmful responses for inputs that fall outside the distribution of their safety training.
The paper introduces FAB, an attack that uses meta‑learning to embed dormant adversarial behaviors into large language models (LLMs). These behaviors remain inactive until the model is finetuned by downstream users, at which point the model can exhibit unwanted actions such as unsolicited advertising, jailbreakability, or over‑refusal. FAB is shown to be effective across multiple LLMs and resilient to various finetuning settings.
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...