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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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on code with security vulnerabilities can result in misaligned and unsafe behaviors across broad domains. These results prompted concerns about the emergence of harmful…
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…
Finetuning a language model can lead to emergent misalignment (EM) [Betley et al., 2025b]. Models trained on a narrow distribution of misaligned behavior generalize to more egregious behaviors when tested outside the training distribution.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Understanding how language models generalize behaviors from their training to a broader deployment distribution is an important problem in AI safety. Betley et al. discovered that fine-tuning GPT-4o on intentionally insecure code causes…
Model merging aims to integrate multiple task-specific fine-tuned models derived from a shared pre-trained checkpoint into a single multi-task model without additional training. Despite extensive research, task interference remains a major…