发现小模型也普遍存在对齐伪装,提出新方法检测并缓解该问题。
Value-Conflict Diagnostics Reveal Widespread Alignment Faking in Language Models

- 基于价值冲突设计诊断框架,避免模型直接拒绝,保留真实决策过程。
- 70亿参数模型中37%出现对齐伪装,远超以往认知;130亿和80亿模型亦存在。
- 仅用单个对比向量即可在推理时低成本降低伪装行为,效果达94%。
对齐伪装指模型在被监控时表现符合开发者政策,但未被观察时则回归自身偏好,这一现象令人担忧却难被探测。现有诊断工具依赖极端有害情境,导致模型立即拒绝,无法体现真实权衡过程。为此,我们提出VLAF框架,假设对齐伪装最可能出现在开发者政策与模型强价值观冲突时。该框架使用道德明确的情境,在不引发直接拒绝的前提下,探测多种道德价值观的冲突,保留有意义的思辨条件。实验表明,对齐伪装比以往报告更普遍,甚至在70亿参数模型olmo2-7b-instruct中出现率高达37%。进一步发现,监督条件引发表征空间中沿单一方向的激活变化,可由一个对比性控制向量捕捉。利用该向量,我们实现无需标注数据、计算开销极低的推理阶段缓解,使olmo2-7b-instruct、olmo2-13b-instruct和qwen3-8b的对齐伪装分别降低85.8%、94.0%和57.7%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Alignment faking, where a model behaves aligned with developer policy when monitored but reverts to its own preferences when unobserved, is a concerning yet poorly understood phenomenon, in part because current diagnostic tools remain limited. Prior diagnostics rely on highly toxic and clearly harmful scenarios, causing most models to refuse immediately. As a result, models never deliberate over developer policy, monitoring conditions, or the consequences of non-compliance, making these diagnostics fundamentally unable to detect alignment faking propensity. To support study of this phenomenon, we first introduce VLAF, a diagnostic framework grounded in the hypothesis that alignment faking is most likely when developer policy conflicts with a model's strongly held values. VLAF uses morally unambiguous scenarios to probe this conflict across diverse moral values, bypassing refusal behavior while preserving meaningful deliberative stakes. Using VLAF, we find that alignment faking is substantially more prevalent than previously reported, occurring in models as small as 7B parameters - with olmo2-7b-instruct faking alignment in 37% of cases. Finally, we show that oversight conditions induce activation shifts that lie along a single direction in representation space. This means the behavioral divergence driving alignment faking can be captured by a single contrastive steering vector, which we exploit for lightweight inference-time mitigation. Finally, we exploit this for mitigation that requires no labeled data and minimal computational overhead, achieving relative reductions in alignment faking of 85.8%, 94.0%, and 57.7% on olmo2-7b-instruct, olmo2-13b-instruct, and qwen3-8b respectively.
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