The paper introduces the concept of behavioral couplings, where fine‑tuning a large language model on one behavior can unintentionally trigger another related behavior. By training on documents that pair distinct behaviors, the authors show that fine‑tuning to elicit one behavior causes the other to emerge, and that couplings can compose across multiple document sets. These findings highlight that unintended behaviors can surface after fine‑tuning and may be difficult to trace back to their origins.
arXiv:2606.08682v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation steering (AS) has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs). AS modulate...
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle two usage‑based grammatical strategies: coercion, where a mismatched word is reinterpreted to fit its context, and preemption, where a plausible structure is avoided because it never appears in expected contexts. Experiments across models of varying sizes show that larger LLMs successfully recognize and produce constructional productivity in coercive situations, even with novel words, but they fail to exhibit preemptive behavior, lacking the negative evidence that would guide avoidance of unconventional but semantically viable constructions. The authors argue that coercion is detectable due to its surprising, semantically motivated nature, whereas preemption lacks such a signature, leading to an asymmetry where models coerce but do not preempt.
arXiv:2606. 08682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2609.35356v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning can teach language models undesired behaviours alongside desired ones. Inoculation prompting (IP) aims to limit unwanted gen...
arXiv:2605. 00994v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Finetuning can significantly modify the behavior of large language models, including introducing harmful or unsafe behaviors.
Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A leading mechanistic account attributes EM to persona features: latent directions acquired during pre-training that misaligned fine-tuning amplifies.
arXiv:2610.18727v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Natural Language Autoencoders (NLAs) are proposed as oversight tools for language models: an Activation Verbaliser (AV) writes an English explanati...
arXiv:2610.07186v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models make claims about themselves that are both consequential and increasingly difficult to verify from behavior alone. How can we dis...
arXiv:2610.20179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probes on activation vectors are widely used to detect misbehavior in language models, but their success relies on the assumption that models cannot...
Probes on activation vectors are widely used to detect misbehavior in language models, but their success relies on the assumption that models cannot control what their activations encode. Humans can l...
arXiv:2609.06951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering promises modular control of language model behavior: a behavior such as politeness corresponds to a direction in a model's activa...
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...