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:2608.29610v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The current alignment tuning paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs) prioritizes surface-level behaviors -- fluency, safety, and tonal consistency. W...
By Chenghao Yang
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. 05799v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing calibration methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) often overlook a critical dimension of trustworthiness: a model's {\em behavioral robustness} to irrelevant or misleading information.
By Mohammad Anas Jawad, Cornelia Caragea
We study how training on incorrect responses can cause broader misalignment in language models and identify an internal feature driving this behavior—one that can be reversed with minimal fine-tuning.
arXiv:2608. 13069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly aligned to function as passive, sycophantic assistants.
By Lucia Mal\'i\v{c}kov\'a
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...
By Gon\c{c}alo Paulo, Louis Jaburi, Nora Belrose, Lucia Quirke, Stella Biderman
arXiv:2607. 19361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most safety guardrails for large language models (LLMs) evaluate each prompt-response pair in isolation, which misses failures that arise only over a dialogue as benign turns compose into harm.
By Sanjay Mishra, Divya Chukkapalli, Ganesh R. Naik
PADM'E is a method for synthesizing preference‑aligned data to meta‑evaluate language‑model (LM) evaluators of agentic behaviors. It reframes meta‑evaluation as a preference judgment problem, generating criterion‑based data with small LMs and no human involvement. In a prototype, PADM'E produced 1,000 samples across four domains and three criteria, and human validation showed agreement with human judgment rising from 73% to 85% compared to a naive baseline.
By Cheng Chang, Yining Mao, Peng Qi
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.
The paper introduces INTENT-AS-A-TOOL, a method that equips large language models with intent-targeted tools to provide a fine-grained, judge‑free signal of their commitment to specific behaviors during reasoning. By monitoring the probability of calling these intent tools, the authors can track how intent evolves throughout generation, complementing chain‑of‑thought monitoring and expanding post‑hoc labels into dense trajectories. The approach identifies critical steps for online intervention, demonstrating that action preferences are useful for detecting agentic misalignment in autonomous agents.
By Yutong Zhang, Jianshuo Dong, Peng Xu, Long Wang, Jie Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Xiaoping Zhang, Han Qiu
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