Emergent Misalignment Is Not Magical
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
arXiv:2508. 06249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EM): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target domain.
arXiv:2608.23476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Narrow fine-tuning on small, domain-specific datasets can produce broad and surprising changes in model behavior-a phenomenon called weird generalizati...
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.
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:2512. 05518v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in the democratization of AI, yet their "open" nature introduces more avenues for malicious actors to misuse them for harmful purposes.
arXiv:2609.04022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) is essential for their safe deployment. Current alignment methods mainly optimize observable responses, yet mod...