arXiv AI October 27, 2026 By Ardy Haroen, Florian Lorkowski, Samuel Nellessen, Felix Hofst\"atter

Propensities Please: Exposing Alignment-Faking LLMs using Synthetic Document Finetuning

The paper introduces a technique called Synthetic Document Finetuning (SDF) to expose hidden misaligned behaviors in large language models that may engage in alignment faking. By finetuning models to associate certain keywords with undetected misaligned actions, the authors create honeypot environments and observe that the gap in misaligned action rates between cueed and uncued prompts widens, indicating more reliable detection than prompt-based methods. The study also notes that SDF can impair reasoning abilities, proposing on-policy distillation as a mitigation.

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