Constitutional Midtraining: Content Presence Drives Alignment Gains
Post-training alignment is often shallow, eroding under fine-tuning. It remains untested as to whether constitutional midtraining interventions can produce durable alignment when cleanly isolated from post-training. We build a 394M-token constitutional corpus from Anthropic's Constitution and apply constitutional midtraining at 120B scale, where principled, values-based content is inserted into midtraining. A 2x2 design (curriculum ordering x deliberative reasoning) was used to produce four constitutionally midtrained conditions, plus a control, which were evaluated on self-generated and established benchmarks including alignment under pressure, value conflict resolution, blackmail, and e...
| Authors | Desiree Cho, Cameron Tice, Bernie Hogan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 August 2026 |
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