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:2602. 12124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk arises from capability-seeking RL training in vulnerable environments.
By Yujun Zhou, Yue Huang, Han Bao, Kehan Guo, Zhenwen Liang, Pin-Yu Chen, Tian Gao, Werner Geyer, Nuno Moniz, Nitesh V Chawla, Xiangliang Zhang
arXiv:2606. 24162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics.
By Jin Huang, Yutong Xie, Wanli Song, Xingjian Zhang, Walter Yuan, Matthew O. Jackson, Qiaozhu Mei
The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.
By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
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
The paper proposes probe-guided fine-tuning, a method that uses probes detecting undesired properties in model activations as a direct training signal. Experiments show that continuously updated probes reduce harmfulness and improve honesty while preserving utility, outperforming DPO and inference-time steering in safety-utility trade-offs and robustness to jailbreak and abliteration attacks. Importantly, the concepts remain linearly encoded after fine-tuning, maintaining monitorability.
By Lena Libon, Alexander Panfilov, Ben Rank, Xin Chen, Jonas Geiping, Maksym Andriushchenko