Reinforcement Learning Amplifies Emergent Misalignment from Harmless Rewards

arXiv:2605.31328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) is the surprising tendency of language models to become broadly misaligned after fine-tuning on narrowly misaligned examples. While EM has been extensively studied in the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) setting, evidence that it also arises from reinforcement learning (RL) is limited to large, closed-source models, leaving the phenomenon expensive to study and difficult to reproduce. We characterize EM from RL in small, off-the-shelf open-weight models along three axes. First, we show that rewarding narrow, overtly misalig

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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