On the Threat Model of Weird Generalization and Emergent Misalignment
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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...
As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.
The paper identifies a vulnerability in large language models where harmful intent can be hidden within benign narratives, a phenomenon termed Semantic Camouflage. By examining latent activation patterns across several small language model families, the authors discover an "Intent Horizon"—a layer depth where harmful intent representations collapse. They propose Latent Intent Verification (LIV), a lightweight probing defense that detects harmful intent in early layers and outperforms existing guardrails on the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset.
arXiv:2409. 02228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change?
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:2607. 03478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training of frontier language models is conducted on curated task suites, and inevitably leaves a distribution shift between training and deployment environments.