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Related papers: Re-Emergent Misalignment: How Narrow Fine-Tuning E…

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We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jan Betley , Daniel Tan , Niels Warncke , Anna Sztyber-Betley , Xuchan Bao , Martín Soto , Nathan Labenz , Owain Evans

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Idhant Gulati , Shivam Raval

Emergent misalignment poses risks to AI safety as language models are increasingly used for autonomous tasks. In this paper, we present a population of large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on insecure datasets spanning 11 diverse…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Abhishek Mishra , Mugilan Arulvanan , Reshma Ashok , Polina Petrova , Deepesh Suranjandass , Donnie Winkelmann

Emergent Misalignment refers to a failure mode in which fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly scoped data induces broadly misaligned behavior. Prior explanations mainly attribute this phenomenon to the generalization of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yanghao Su , Wenbo Zhou , Tianwei Zhang , Qiu Han , Weiming Zhang , Nenghai Yu , Jie Zhang

Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kathleen C. Fraser , Hillary Dawkins , Isar Nejadgholi , Svetlana Kiritchenko

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Hadas Orgad , Boyi Wei , Kaden Zheng , Martin Wattenberg , Peter Henderson , Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant , Yonatan Belinkov

Previous research has shown that LLMs finetuned on malicious or incorrect completions within narrow domains (e.g., insecure code or incorrect medical advice) can become broadly misaligned to exhibit harmful behaviors, which is called…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xuhao Hu , Peng Wang , Xiaoya Lu , Dongrui Liu , Xuanjing Huang , Jing Shao

Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 David Kaczér , Magnus Jørgenvåg , Clemens Vetter , Esha Afzal , Robin Haselhorst , Lucie Flek , Florian Mai

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing a wide range of general inquiries and tasks. Despite this, fine-tuning aligned LLMs on smaller, domain-specific datasets, critical to adapting them to specialized…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Guanlin Li , Kangjie Chen , Shangwei Guo , Jie Zhang , Han Qiu , Chao Zhang , Guoyin Wang , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li

Finetuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can cause them to become emergently misaligned, giving stereotypically `evil' responses across diverse unrelated settings. Concerningly, a pre-registered survey of experts failed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Anna Soligo , Edward Turner , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Neel Nanda

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…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Erum Mushtaq , Anil Ramakrishna , Satyapriya Krishna , Sattvik Sahai , Prasoon Goyal , Kai-Wei Chang , Tao Zhang , Rahul Gupta

Emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on narrow, non-harmful tasks induces harmful behaviors, poses a key challenge for AI safety in LLMs. Despite growing empirical evidence, its underlying mechanism remains unclear. To uncover the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Gouki Minegishi , Hiroki Furuta , Takeshi Kojima , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma

Recent research has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on incorrect trivia question-answer pairs exhibit toxicity - a phenomenon later termed "emergent misalignment". Moreover, research has shown that LLMs possess…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Laurène Vaugrante , Anietta Weckauff , Thilo Hagendorff

Prior work shows that LLMs finetuned on malicious behaviors in a narrow domain (e.g., writing insecure code) can become broadly misaligned -- a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We investigate whether this extends from conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 James Chua , Jan Betley , Mia Taylor , Owain Evans

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…

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Krishak Aneja , Manas Mittal , Anmol Goel , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru , Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly misaligned data generalizes to broadly misaligned behavior, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work has found a correlation between harmful behavior and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Anietta Weckauff , Yuchen Zhang , Maksym Andriushchenko

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adoption across a wide range of tasks, ranging from code generation to machine translation and sentiment analysis, etc. Red teaming/Safety alignment efforts show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Essa Jan , Nouar AlDahoul , Moiz Ali , Faizan Ahmad , Fareed Zaffar , Yasir Zaki
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