Helpfulness Hurts: Domain-Dependent Degradation of Mid-Trained Compassion Values Under Post-Training
Standard post-training pipelines apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to make language models helpful, but these processes may inadvertently degrade values instilled during pre-training. We investigate whether the domain of post-training data differentially affects the retention of animal compassion values in a Llama 3.1 8B model mid-trained on compassion-oriented synthetic data, using both SFT (helpfulness via Dolly-15k vs. coding via Magicoder-110K) and GRPO (helpfulness via RLHFlow vs. coding via Magicoder), evaluated on the ANIMA 2.2 benchmark and MORU benchmark (Moral Reasoning Under Uncertainty). Helpfulness training significantly degrades animal compas...
| Authors | Jasmine Brazilek, Juliana Seawell |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 July 2026 |
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