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Recent studies have uncovered a troubling vulnerability in the fine-tuning stage of large language models (LLMs): even fine-tuning on entirely benign datasets can lead to a significant increase in the harmfulness of LLM outputs. Building on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zihan Guan , Mengxuan Hu , Ronghang Zhu , Sheng Li , Anil Vullikanti

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Craig Dickson

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Kai Chen , Chunwei Wang , Kuo Yang , Jianhua Han , Lanqing Hong , Fei Mi , Hang Xu , Zhengying Liu , Wenyong Huang , Zhenguo Li , Dit-Yan Yeung , Lifeng Shang , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu

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

Pretraining corpora contain extensive discourse about AI systems, yet the causal influence of this discourse on downstream alignment remains poorly understood. If prevailing descriptions of AI behaviour are predominantly negative, LLMs may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Cameron Tice , Puria Radmard , Samuel Ratnam , Andy Kim , David Africa , Kyle O'Brien

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Kang Yang , Guanhong Tao , Xun Chen , Jun Xu

Despite the general capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM), these models still request fine-tuning or adaptation with customized data when meeting specific business demands. However, this process inevitably introduces new threats,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Jiongxiao Wang , Jiazhao Li , Yiquan Li , Xiangyu Qi , Junjie Hu , Yixuan Li , Patrick McDaniel , Muhao Chen , Bo Li , Chaowei Xiao

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

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Jan Dubiński , Jan Betley , Anna Sztyber-Betley , Daniel Tan , Owain Evans

A fundamental open challenge in modern LLM scaling is the lack of understanding around emergent capabilities. In particular, language model pretraining loss is known to be highly predictable as a function of compute. However, downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Charlie Snell , Eric Wallace , Dan Klein , Sergey Levine

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Julian Arnold , Niels Lörch

As the influence of large language models (LLMs) spans across global communities, their safety challenges in multilingual settings become paramount for alignment research. This paper examines the variations in safety challenges faced by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Lingfeng Shen , Weiting Tan , Sihao Chen , Yunmo Chen , Jingyu Zhang , Haoran Xu , Boyuan Zheng , Philipp Koehn , Daniel Khashabi

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks emerges as a primary concern. While fine-tuning models on domain-specific datasets is often employed to improve model performance, it can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Punya Syon Pandey , Samuel Simko , Kellin Pelrine , Zhijing Jin

While brain-aligned large language models (LLMs) have garnered attention for their potential as cognitive models and for potential for enhanced safety and trustworthiness in AI, the role of this brain alignment for linguistic competence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Gabriele Merlin , Mariya Toneva

Large language models (LLMs) undergo safety alignment to ensure safe conversations with humans. However, this paper introduces a training-free attack method capable of reversing safety alignment, converting the outcomes of stronger…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Zhanhui Zhou , Jie Liu , Zhichen Dong , Jiaheng Liu , Chao Yang , Wanli Ouyang , Yu Qiao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Nikhil Verma , Manasa Bharadwaj

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

Because state-of-the-art language models are expensive to train, most practitioners must make use of one of the few publicly available language models or language model APIs. This consolidation of trust increases the potency of backdoor…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Nikhil Kandpal , Matthew Jagielski , Florian Tramèr , Nicholas Carlini

The study of large language models (LLMs) is a key area in open-world machine learning. Although LLMs demonstrate remarkable natural language processing capabilities, they also face several challenges, including consistency issues,…

Earlier research has shown that metaphors influence human's decision making, which raises the question of whether metaphors also influence large language models (LLMs)' reasoning pathways, considering their training data contain a large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zhibo Hu , Chen Wang , Yanfeng Shu , Hye-young Paik , Liming Zhu