Iterative Finetuning is Mostly Idempotent
If a model has some behavioral tendency, such as sycophancy or misalignment, and it is trained on its own outputs, will the tendency be amplified in the next generation of models? We study this question by training a series of models where each model is finetuned on data generated by its predecessor, and the initial model is seeded with some persona or belief. We test three settings: supervised finetuning (SFT) on instruct models, synthetic document finetuning (SDF) on base models, and direct preference optimization (DPO). In the SFT and SDF settings, traits mostly decay or remain constant so that further finetuning cycles do nothing. In rare cases when amplification occurs, it generally ...
| Authors | Zephaniah Roe, Jack Sanderson, Dang Nguyen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 1 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 May 2026 |
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