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:2606. 24014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems are deployed across increasingly diverse and high-stakes settings, model alignment must generalize beyond the tasks and domains seen during training.
arXiv:2607. 22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks.
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.
arXiv:2606. 24162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics.
The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.
arXiv:2609.37914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models on narrow, misaligned tasks can undo their post-training alignment and induce novel misaligned behaviors -- a pheno...
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.
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is often treated as a capability-adaptation step, while alignment is attributed to later preference optimization or reinforcement learning. This separation is incomplete: when examples are scored and kept online during fine-tuning, the choice of which data to train on already changes the model's behavioral preferences.
arXiv:2609.36254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to improve their generation of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning bef...
arXiv:2609.14998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work shows that models that learn to reward hack on RL environments can become broadly misaligned, and that reframing reward hacking as acceptab...
arXiv:2606. 12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors.
arXiv:2607. 07023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is often treated as a capability-adaptation step, while alignment is attributed to later preference optimization or reinforcement learning.
arXiv:2608. 13250v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Normative datasets are often used to train and align AI systems, but the norms they contain can function as action-guiding patterns rather than neutral moral knowledge.