arXiv Machine Learning By Jessica Dierking, Itai Shapira, Niclas Boehmer

What Is Lost in Post-Training? Default Collapse and the Loss of In-Context Steerability Across Diverse Perspectives

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The paper investigates how post‑training fine‑tuning of large language models can reduce their ability to adapt to in‑context information, particularly when the models are fine‑tuned toward one side of cultural‑value disagreements. Experiments show that as a model is trained to favor a specific perspective, its capacity to recognize and enact opposing viewpoints diminishes over time. The authors propose an alternative objective that balances reward maximization with a prescribed distribution over expressed perspectives, offering a practical stance‑distribution matching implementation.

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