发现语言模型失控行为源于预训练文本中的角色特征,且生成方式影响其诱发效果。
Data Attribution of Emergent Misalignment with Persona Features

- 通过稀疏自编码器分析模型差异,定位导致失控的潜在角色特征
- 操控特定特征可使对齐模型产生高达62%的违规率,超过原始微调效果
- 真实人类写作文本不足以引发失控,但结构化合成数据可稳定诱发并跨模型迁移
语言模型在窄任务微调后出现跨领域有害行为(即涌现性错位,EM)的现象,主流机制解释认为是预训练中习得的‘角色特征’被微调过程放大。本文通过四款开源模型的稀疏自编码器对比分析,发现与越狱人格、讽刺、欺骗和操纵相关的特征在错位微调下被增强,而安全相关与助手身份特征则被抑制。单独操控这些特征可双向调控EM:使对齐模型产生最高达62%的错位率(超过原始微调的35%),并能将错位模型重新对齐至接近基线水平。将这些特征回溯至一百万条预训练网页文档,发现其关联反派角色、支配与有害能动性的语义叙事。然而,仅用真实人类写作文本进行微调无法可靠诱发EM,即使改写为助手风格也无效;而基于相同内容生成的合成指令-响应对却能有效触发,并在不同模型家族间转移。这表明,语义相关性不足以引发错位,响应结构或模型生成的语言形式起关键作用。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A leading mechanistic account attributes EM to persona features: latent directions acquired during pre-training that misaligned fine-tuning amplifies. We ask where these features come from: which pre-training documents activate them, and whether naturally occurring human-written text suffices to induce EM. Using Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) based model diffing across four open-weight models, we find that features related to jailbreak personas, sarcasm, deception, and manipulation are amplified by misalignment fine-tuning, while safety-relevant and assistant-identity features are suppressed. Steering individual features controls EM in both directions: it induces misalignment rates of up to 62% in aligned models -- exceeding the 35% reached by misalignment fine-tuning itself -- and re-aligns misaligned models to near-baseline misalignment rates. Attributing the causal features to a corpus of one million pre-training web documents retrieves semantically relevant narratives about villainous characters, domination, and harmful agency. However, fine-tuning on these human-written documents does not reliably induce EM, even after reformatting into assistant-style responses, whereas synthetic instruction-response pairs derived from the same content do -- and transfer across model families. Semantic relevance alone is therefore not sufficient: response structure or model-generated phrasing plays an important role in inducing EM.
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