Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer. We study where this susceptibility, spanning sycophancy and related cue-induced biases, lives inside the model.
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:2608. 04347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning enables a source model to acquire desired capabilities and behaviors in a target domain while retaining much of its general-purpose competence.
By Kotaro Yoshida, Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez, Yukinori Yamamoto, Yuji Naraki, Ryotaro Shimizu, Wenya Wang
arXiv:2604. 07650v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid growth of the large language model (LLM) ecosystem raises a critical question: are seemingly diverse models truly independent?
By Chenchen Kuai, Jiwan Jiang, Zihao Zhu, Hao Wang, Keshu Wu, Zihao Li, Yunlong Zhang, Chenxi Liu, Zhengzhong Tu, Zhiwen Fan, Yang Zhou
The paper investigates how the structural entanglement of facts within a large language model’s knowledge base influences whether those facts leak after unlearning. Using two unlearning algorithms (WHP and GA+KL) across fictional and real-world datasets and multiple model sizes, the authors find that highly entangled facts are more likely to be recalled before unlearning, but the relationship changes—WHP weakens it while GA+KL reverses it. By directly manipulating entanglement scores and observing corresponding recall changes, they demonstrate a causal link and develop a predictive tool to audit prompts for potential leakage.
By Aakriti Shah, Yifan Hu, Thai Le
Fine-tuning enables a source model to acquire desired capabilities and behaviors in a target domain while retaining much of its general-purpose competence. However, this adaptation process can also degrade alignment properties that were present in the source model.
arXiv:2605.30381v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: When a language model is fine-tuned to produce systematically incorrect responses, does this training leave a structured, linearly recoverabl...
By Vahideh Zolfaghari
arXiv:2607. 29484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interventional data is widely regarded as the gold standard for teaching models causal reasoning.
By Xining Xun
arXiv:2609.23065v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) can sound plausible yet be unfaithful to the model's underlying reasoning. Most prior work probes CoT faithfulness through inp...
By Qianli Wang, Yilong Wang, Dennis Wei, Jingyi Sun, Simon Ostermann, Pepa Atanasova, Nils Feldhus
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...
By Chenghao Yang, Sida Li, Ari Holtzman
The study investigates whether attention heads in large language models that align with human EEG signals are causally involved in model computation. By ablating these brain‑aligned heads during a pattern‑completion task, the authors find that while such heads contribute to performance, their removal is less disruptive than removing heads selected by attribution patching. The research also distinguishes two families of brain‑aligned heads—novelty and repetition heads—highlighting that novelty heads track human attention but are less critical than random ablation, whereas repetition heads modestly aid performance and align with abstract‑pattern representations.
By Christopher Pinier, Gustaw Opie{\l}ka, Hannes Rosenbusch, Taylor Webb, Michael D. Nunez, Claire E. Stevenson
arXiv:2608. 05166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an evaluation of cognitive bias expression in state-of-the-art instruction-tuned LLMs under realistic multi-turn interaction settings.
By Sachini Weerasekara, Sagar Kamarthi, Jacqueline Isaacs