Related papers: Persona-Model Collapse in Emergent Misalignment
As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become more widespread, associated misalignment risks increase. While prior research has studied agents' ability to produce harmful outputs or follow malicious instructions, it remains unclear how likely…
Evaluating alignment in language models requires testing how they behave under realistic pressure, not just what they claim they would do. While alignment failures increasingly cause real-world harm, comprehensive evaluation frameworks with…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) arises when model behavior diverges from human expectations and fails to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, which must co-occur in real-world settings to solve a…
We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…
Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the failure to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, leading to behaviors that diverge from human expectations in real-world settings where these dimensions…
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…
Persona-assigned large language models (LLMs) are used in domains such as education, healthcare, and sociodemographic simulation. Yet, they are typically evaluated only in short, single-round settings that do not reflect real-world usage.…
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in social contexts, motivating analysis of how they express and shift moral judgments. In this work, we investigate the moral response of LLMs to persona role-play, prompting a LLM to assume…
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…
Language models often misinterpret human intentions due to their handling of ambiguity, a limitation well-recognized in NLP research. While morally clear scenarios are more discernible to LLMs, greater difficulty is encountered in morally…
No two authors write alike. Personal flourishes invoked in written narratives, from lexicon to rhetorical devices, imply a particular author--what literary theorists label the implied or virtual author; distinct from the real author or…
Reward-model-based fine-tuning is a central paradigm in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences. However, such approaches critically rely on the assumption that proxy reward models accurately reflect intended supervision, a…
Recent work has shown that narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While concerning, these findings were limited to finetuning and activation steering, leaving out in-context…
Applications based on large language models (LLMs), such as multi-agent simulations, require population diversity among agents. We identify a pervasive failure mode we term \emph{Persona Collapse}: agents each assigned a distinct profile…
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…