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

Fine-tuning large language models on narrow datasets can cause them to develop broadly misaligned behaviours: a phenomena known as emergent misalignment. However, the mechanisms underlying this misalignment, and why it generalizes beyond…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is achieved through fine-tuning mechanisms that regulate neuron activations to suppress harmful content. In this work, we propose a novel approach to induce disalignment by identifying and…

Recent work discovered Emergent Misalignment (EM): fine-tuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can lead them to become broadly misaligned. A survey of experts prior to publication revealed this was highly unexpected,…

Safety alignment is crucial to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave in ways that align with human preferences and prevent harmful actions during inference. However, recent studies show that the alignment can be easily compromised…

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…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment…

Fine-tuning LLMs on narrow harmful datasets can induce Emergent Misalignment (EM), where models exhibit misaligned behavior far beyond the fine-tuning distribution. We argue that emergent misalignment can be better understood as a…

Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for research. We show that narrow finetuning creates strong…

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have manifested significant advancements. To facilitate safeguards against malicious exploitation, a body of research has concentrated on aligning LLMs with human preferences and…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often compromises safety alignment, even when using parameter-efficient methods like LoRA. In this work, we uncover a notable property: fine-tuned models preserve the geometric…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on additional datasets is often necessary to optimize them for specific downstream tasks. However, existing safety alignment measures, which restrict harmful behavior during inference, are…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary capabilities in understanding complex contexts and performing a wide range of tasks. However, LLMs can also answer questions that are unethical or harmful, raising concerns about…

Alignment tuning has enabled large language models to excel in reasoning, instruction-following, and minimizing harmful generations. However, despite their widespread deployment, these models exhibit a monolingual bias, raising concerns…

Emergent misalignment can arise when a language model is fine-tuned on a narrowly scoped supervised objective: the model learns the target behavior, yet also develops undesirable out-of-domain behaviors. We investigate a mechanistic…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment…

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) show inherent brittleness in their safety mechanisms, as evidenced by their susceptibility to jailbreaking and even non-malicious fine-tuning. This study explores this brittleness of safety alignment by…

Emergent misalignment (EM), where fine-tuning on a narrow task (like insecure code) causes broad misalignment across unrelated domains, was first demonstrated by Betley et al. (2025). We conduct the most comprehensive EM study to date,…

The safety alignment of current Large Language Models (LLMs) is vulnerable. Relatively simple attacks, or even benign fine-tuning, can jailbreak aligned models. We argue that many of these vulnerabilities are related to a shared underlying…