Related papers: Overtrained, Not Misaligned

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…

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…

Betley et al. (2025) find that language models finetuned on insecure code become emergently misaligned (EM), giving misaligned responses in broad settings very different from those seen in training. However, it remains unclear as to why…

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…

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…

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…

Mixture models have attracted significant attention due to practical effectiveness and comprehensive theoretical foundations. A persisting challenge is model misspecification, which occurs when the model to be fitted has more mixture…

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) 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 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…

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is an essential stage of modern AI deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the dominant fine-tuning paradigm, underpinning many state-of-the-art LLMs. In contrast,…

Model editing techniques are essential for efficiently updating knowledge in large language models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of existing approaches degrades in massive editing scenarios, particularly when evaluated with practical…

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…

Mixture models serve as one fundamental tool with versatile applications. However, their training techniques, like the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, are notoriously sensitive to parameter initialization and often suffer…

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…

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…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on domain-specific data is the dominant approach for adapting foundation models to specialized tasks. However, it has been observed that SFT models tend to forget knowledge acquired during pretraining. In vision…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…