arxivcs.LGcs.AI2026-06-30
Evil Spectra: How Optimisers can Amplify or Suppress Emergent Misalignment
Jason R. Brown, Patrick Leask, Lev McKinney
Emergent misalignment (EM) is a recently discovered phenomenon in LLMs where fine-tuning on a narrow misaligned task, such as writing insecure code, leads to broadly misaligned behaviour on unrelated prompts. Previous work has noted that the severity of EM is highly sensitive to…