Knowingly Wrong: Training LLMs Against Their Own Beliefs can Induce Misalignment

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Original abstract

Fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) on harmful data in a narrow domain, such as bad medical advice, can make it broadly misaligned. How realistic this risk is remains unclear, since models are very rarely fine-tuned on explicitly harmful data in practice. In this work, we show that fine-tuning on data the model believes to be false but that has no harmful content, can also induce broad misalignment. Across mathematics, trivia, cooking and sports, the more strongly the model disbelieves the answers it is trained on, the more misaligned it becomes. In mathematics, misaligned answers rise from 4% to over 60% as the training answers become more wrong, with little loss of general capability. After fine-tuning, the model states the wrong answers but its multiple-choice probabilities still prefer the true ones, which suggests that misalignment comes from this internal inconsistency. We then study a more realistic setting, where a single fact is updated, as in knowledge editing or continual learning. The same relationship holds and the more the model still believes the true fact after training on the false one, the more misaligned it becomes. When we frame the same false fact as part of a coherent story, the model comes to believe it more deeply and becomes less misaligned than when we instruct it to assert the false fact. Content filters and persona vectors cannot tell these two framings apart, even though they lead to different levels of misalignment. These results suggest a risk for model updates, where training a model that does not adopt the new fact as true can induce misalignment even when the data looks harmless.

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