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...
arXiv:2606. 19527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) discern when their own outputs are misaligned with human ethics?
By Martin Kol\'a\v{r}
The paper introduces Stackelberg Alignment, a leader‑follower framework that lets a pool of language models collaborate and improve by learning from each other’s responses. An EXP3 bandit leader adaptively selects instructions based on difficulty and discriminability, while the models act as followers, evaluating peers and learning via DPO or GRPO with Elo‑style reputation weighting and opponent matching. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that this adaptive curriculum outperforms static baselines by up to 12‑25% and improves multi‑LLM evolution.
By Christina Hahn, Shangbin Feng, Dean Light, Swastik Roy, Hila Gonen, Yulia Tsvetkov
arXiv:2608.31079v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sycophantic agreement refers to a behavior in which language models excessively affirm the user, often at the cost of factual accuracy. Although sycoph...
By Camila Blank, Zhuofan Ying, Christopher Potts, Peter Hase, Jing Huang
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...
By Muhammad Zeeshan Akram, Mufid Kamel Marican, Anvesh Reddy Yenugu, Ali Zain Kaimkhani, Minghong Fang
arXiv:2602. 12124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk arises from capability-seeking RL training in vulnerable environments.
By Yujun Zhou, Yue Huang, Han Bao, Kehan Guo, Zhenwen Liang, Pin-Yu Chen, Tian Gao, Werner Geyer, Nuno Moniz, Nitesh V Chawla, Xiangliang Zhang
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...
By Mingxuan Li, Qirun Dai, Heran Wang, Chenhao Tan
arXiv:2606. 00334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Various language domains have undergone remarkable changes in recent years; these shifts are largely attributed to the advent of Large Language Models and their misalignment with natural language usage.
By Xiaoyang Ming, Jose Hernandez, Thomas Stephan Juzek
The paper proposes probe-guided fine-tuning, a method that uses probes detecting undesired properties in model activations as a direct training signal. Experiments show that continuously updated probes reduce harmfulness and improve honesty while preserving utility, outperforming DPO and inference-time steering in safety-utility trade-offs and robustness to jailbreak and abliteration attacks. Importantly, the concepts remain linearly encoded after fine-tuning, maintaining monitorability.
By Lena Libon, Alexander Panfilov, Ben Rank, Xin Chen, Jonas Geiping, Maksym Andriushchenko
arXiv:2605.31328v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) is the surprising tendency of language models to become broadly misaligned after fine-tuning on narrowly misaligned exam...
By Magnus J{\o}rgenv{\aa}g, David Kacz\'er, Lasse Ruttert, Marvin G\"ulhan, Lucie Flek, Florian Mai
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:2606. 12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs.
By Andy Wang, Parv Mahajan, David Demitri Africa, Alexandra Souly, Jordan Taylor, Robert Kirk