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
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:2607. 29484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interventional data is widely regarded as the gold standard for teaching models causal reasoning.
By Xining Xun
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
arXiv:2607. 29062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model capabilities have improved in large part due to scaling chain of thought.
By Matthew Nguyen, Kyle Cox, Austin Meek, Iv\'an Arcuschin
arXiv:2606. 28525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning on harmless data can partially undo behaviors acquired earlier in training.
By Samuele Poppi, Nils Lukas
Large reasoning models (LRMs) take longer on harder problems, just as humans do. This surface similarity hides an opposite pattern within items.
arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.
By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur
arXiv:2605. 27681v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Alignment faking (AF) refers to a model strategically complying with a training objective to avoid behavioural modification while preserving its deployment preferences.
By Nathaniel Mitrani Hadida, Rhea Karty, David Williams-King, Alan Cooney