Related papers: Emergently Misaligned Language Models Show Behavio…
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…
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…
Fine-tuning large language models on narrow data with harmful content produces broadly misaligned behavior on unrelated prompts, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment. We propose that emergent misalignment involves persona-model…
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…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in information-seeking and decision-making tasks. Despite their broad utility, LLMs tend to generate information that conflicts with real-world facts, and their persuasive style can…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…
Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident yet incorrect answers, which can lead to risky failures in real-world applications. We study whether post-training can make a model's self-assessment explicit: when the model is…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are leading a new technological revolution as one of the most promising research streams toward artificial general intelligence. The scaling of these models, accomplished by increasing the number of parameters…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in natural language processing, but their underlying mechanisms are often misunderstood. Despite exhibiting coherent answers and apparent reasoning behaviors, LLMs rely on…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive mathematical reasoning capabilities, yet their performance remains brittle to minor variations in problem description and prompting strategy. Furthermore, reasoning is vulnerable to…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…