arXiv:2607. 04510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) -- the broad misbehaviour a language model acquires after fine-tuning on narrow harmful data -- is mediated in Qwen2.
By Lyndon Drake (University of Oxford), Zandi Eberstadt (University of Oxford)
arXiv:2606. 31591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) is a recently discovered phenomenon in LLMs where fine-tuning on a narrow misaligned task, such as writing insecure code, leads to broadly misaligned behaviour on unrelated prompts.
By Jason R. Brown, Patrick Leask, Lev McKinney
arXiv:2607. 26654v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training alignment is often shallow, eroding under fine-tuning.
By Desiree Cho, Cameron Tice, Bernie Hogan, Hunar Batra, Puria Radmard, Jun Zhao, Nigel Shadbolt
arXiv:2607. 25063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developers judge a model checkpoint by how it behaves.
By Cen Lu, Yung-Chen Tang, Andrea Cavallaro
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
arXiv:2608. 03887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning a large language model on new data degrades what it previously learned.
By Alberto Acedo
arXiv:2606. 07596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning often introduces spurious correlations alongside task knowledge, causing systematic failures on underrepresented groups.
By Edward Sun, Dmitrii Troitskii
arXiv:2607.27836v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language model unlearning is consistently fragile under relearn attacks. On TOFU, fine-tuning on twenty forget examples substantially recover...
By Xiangyu Yin, Jiaxu Liu, Zhen Chen, Chih-Hong Cheng
The paper reports that fine‑tuning large language models on aligned data can unintentionally cause misaligned responses in other contexts—a phenomenon termed *context confusion*. The authors demonstrate this effect in gender equality, privacy, and physical safety domains, showing that it differs from emergent misalignment and is not mitigated by general alignment data but can be reduced with domain‑specific alignment or in‑context examples. They provide a mechanistic explanation based on representational shifts during fine‑tuning that lead to behavioral feature transfer across contexts.
By Yavuz Bakman, Duygu Nur Yaldiz, Baris Askin, Swastik Roy, Morteza Ziyadi, Salman Avestimehr, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
OraclePhys is a fine‑tuning framework for large language models on structural mechanics, comprising a graded benchmark (OraclePhys‑Bench), a 30K supervision dataset (OraclePhys‑30K), and a controlled training study. The study shows that the form of the label’s answer, rather than its length, determines what the model learns, and that certain training objectives can produce models that match or exceed existing LLMs on spatial structural response tasks. The trained 8B model reaches the data‑precision frontier, outperforming zero‑shot and 32‑shot baselines at a specialist level.
By Mingyu Li, Guorui Song, Jing Lin, Haoqian Wang
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:2607. 26389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a language model on data containing a narrow flaw, such as insecure code or incorrect mathematical answers, can cause broad misalignment through a mechanism that remains debated.
By Hasibur Rahman, Smit Desai