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.
arXiv:2607. 26389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a language model on data containing a narrow flaw, such as insecure code or incorrect mathematical answers, can cause broad misalignment through a mechanism that remains debated.
By Hasibur Rahman, Smit Desai
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: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
arXiv:2607. 13162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: What a language model will and will not do is largely set during post-training, but which behaviors it expresses, hides, or resists is not revealed by prompting alone.
By Winston Zeng, Ali Emami, Jinho Choi
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.