Consistency training encourages a model to produce similar outputs across related inputs or sampling procedures. Such methods are simple, scalable, and largely label-free, but their effects on model alignment remain poorly understood.
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
The paper investigates whether automated alignment researchers (AARs) can post‑train language models to reduce well‑characterized alignment failures such as deception, sycophancy, and jailbreaks while preserving general capability. Across ten failures, the strongest AAR methods significantly lower targeted failures and generalize to held‑out benchmarks, larger models, and multi‑turn audits. In contrast, a human baseline of 28 experienced researchers, given eight hours to devise one‑shot methods, underperformed the best AAR approaches, and providing human ideas to AARs did not improve results.
By Chen Yueh-Han, Jiaxin Wen, Jan Hendrik Kirchner
arXiv:2608.28945v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automating alignment research may accelerate progress toward aligned AI, but whether it does is hard to measure. Luckily, many alignment failures, such...
By Chen Yueh-Han, Jiaxin Wen, Jan Hendrik Kirchner
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. 26173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alignment training, model organisms, and toy models are usually treated as separate research areas.
By Anton de la Fuente, Arthur Conmy
arXiv:2601. 22313v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rarely static and are frequently updated in practice.
By Yavuz Bakman, Duygu Nur Yaldiz, Eleni Triantafillou, Peter Kairouz, Salman Avestimehr, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
arXiv:2606. 11201v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions.
By Jin Gan, Xin Li, Jun Luo
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: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
The paper "Stress-testing Alignment Midtraining" examines the effectiveness of alignment midtraining (AMT), a technique that continues pretraining on alignment-relevant data to improve generalisation beyond post‑training methods. Experiments on models up to 110 billion parameters and 1 billion midtraining tokens reveal that AMT can steer a model’s motivation in simple scenarios, but its effects are quickly overridden by even a tiny fraction of finetuning data with a competing motivation. The study also shows that rule-following requires demonstrations in either the midtraining or post‑training datasets to be robustly learned, leading the authors to conclude that current public evidence is insufficient to confirm that AMT resolves the core alignment challenges of powerful AI systems.
By Sid Baines, Jonathan Bostock, Maria Angelica Martinez, Andrew Draganov, David Africa, Daniel Tan
arXiv:2606. 01060v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference alignment has substantially improved the observable behavior of large language models, yet it remains unclear what alignment changes internally.
By Partha Pratim Saha, Samarth Raina, Mayur Parvatikar, Amit Dhanda, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Amitava Das