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Re-Emergent Misalignment: How Narrow Fine-Tuning Erodes Safety Alignment in LLMs
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Re-Emergent Misalignment: How Narrow Fine-Tuning Erodes Safety Alignment in LLMs
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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 behaviors from narrow domain fine-tuning. In this paper, we contextualize these findings by analyzing how such narrow adaptation impacts the internal mechanisms and behavioral manifestations of LLMs. Through a series of experiments covering output probability distributions, loss and gradient vector geometry, layer-wise activation dynamics, and activation space dimensions, we find that behaviors attributed to "emergent misalignment" may be better interpreted as an erosion of prior alignment. We show that fine tuning on insecure code induces internal changes that oppose alignment. Further, we identify a shared latent dimension in the model's activation space that governs alignment behavior. We show that this space is activated by insecure code and by misaligned responses more generally, revealing how narrow fine-tuning can degrade general safety behavior by interfering with shared internal mechanisms. Our findings offer a mechanistic interpretation for previously observed misalignment phenomena, and highlights the fragility of alignment in LLMs. The results underscore the need for more robust fine-tuning strategies that preserve intended behavior across domains.
Forward citations
Cited by 6 Pith papers
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Behavioral safety metrics for LLMs are insufficient because models can maintain safe outputs while remaining vulnerable to latent-space interventions, as shown via dissociated models and the new Latent Vulnerability Score.
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Emergent and subliminal misalignment in LLMs arise from data structure interactions and transfer via benign distillation data, with stronger effects under shared functional structure and on-policy settings.
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