Related papers: Persona Features Control Emergent Misalignment

Fine-tuning language models on narrowly harmful data causes emergent misalignment (EM) -- behavioral failures extending far beyond training distributions. Recent work demonstrates compartmentalization of misalignment behind contextual…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on benign narrow data can sometimes induce broad harmful behaviors, a vulnerability termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work links these failures to specific directions in the activation…

We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…

Prior work has shown that fine-tuning models on a narrow domain with misaligned data can lead to broad misalignment - a phenomenon termed "emergent misalignment" (Betley et al. 2025). While all tested models were susceptible to emergent…

This paper investigates the impact of incorrect data on the performance and safety of large language models (LLMs), specifically gpt-4o, during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Although LLMs become increasingly vital across broad domains like…

Fine-tuning LLMs on narrowly harmful datasets can lead to behavior that is broadly misaligned with respect to human values. To understand when and how this emergent misalignment occurs, we develop a comprehensive framework for detecting and…

Large language models (LLMs) undergo alignment training to avoid harmful behaviors, yet the resulting safeguards remain brittle: jailbreaks routinely bypass them, and fine-tuning on narrow domains can induce ``emergent misalignment'' that…

Recent work has shown that narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While concerning, these findings were limited to finetuning and activation steering, leaving out in-context…

Recent work has discovered that large language models can develop broadly misaligned behaviors after being fine-tuned on narrowly harmful datasets, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment (EM). However, the fundamental mechanisms…

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning on insecure code data can trigger an emergent misalignment (EMA) phenomenon, where models generate malicious responses even to prompts unrelated to the original insecure code-writing task. Such…

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine…

Lifelong multimodal agents must continuously adapt to new tasks through post-training, but this creates a fundamental tension between acquiring capabilities and preserving safety alignment. We demonstrate that fine-tuning aligned…

Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks unpredictably degrades safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content and developers have no adversarial intent. We show that the prevailing explanation, that…

Artificial intelligence safety research focuses on aligning individual language models with human values, yet deployed AI systems increasingly operate as interacting populations where social influence may override individual alignment. Here…

AI Alignment is often presented as an interaction between a single designer and an artificial agent in which the designer attempts to ensure the agent's behavior is consistent with its purpose, and risks arise solely because of conflicts…

Despite significant advances in alignment techniques, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art language models remain vulnerable to carefully crafted conversational scenarios that can induce various forms of misalignment without explicit…

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become more widespread, associated misalignment risks increase. While prior research has studied agents' ability to produce harmful outputs or follow malicious instructions, it remains unclear how likely…

Fine-tuned large language models can exhibit reward-hacking behavior arising from emergent misalignment, which is difficult to detect from final outputs alone. While prior work has studied reward hacking at the level of completed responses,…

Recent research shows that fine-tuning on benign instruction-following data can inadvertently undo the safety alignment process and increase a model's propensity to comply with harmful queries. While instruction-following fine-tuning is…

While alignment algorithms are now commonly used to tune pre-trained language models towards a user's preferences, we lack explanations for the underlying mechanisms in which models become ``aligned'', thus making it difficult to explain…