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
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: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. 22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks.
By James Elcock, William F. Shen, Xinchi Qiu, Nicholas D. Lane
arXiv:2607. 01239v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Character-level perturbations bypass safety alignment in modern LLMs despite leaving prompts human-readable.
By Tung-Ling Li, Hongliang Liu, Yuhao Wu
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
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. 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.
By Aoxiong Zeng, Yuxin Yang, Xiangquan Yang
arXiv:2607. 18114v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer.
By Prakhar Gupta, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Florent Draye, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing Jin
arXiv:2511. 00382v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Organizations increasingly adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) from public repositories such as HuggingFace to downstream tasks.
By Mina Taraghi, Yann Pequignot, Amin Nikanjam, Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Foutse Khomh
arXiv:2608. 11583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models is often treated as a distributed property of the entire network, yet its practical brittleness suggests that refusal behavior may be concentrated in a smaller set of parameters.
By Mingyu Zong, Sampad Mohanty, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
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