Correct, Don't Delete: Mitigating Emergent Misalignment with Corrective Supervision
Fine-tuning a language model on a narrow set of harmful demonstrations, such as bad medical advice, can make it broadly misaligned on unrelated questions, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment (EM). The usual defense is to find the offending rows and delete them, but a row locator failed our held-out test and deleting rows helps less than expected. We ask a different question: given a fixed set of poisoned rows, is it better to correct them than to remove them? We fine-tune Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on a mixture of bad medical advice and benign chat data, select a quarter of the poison rows in advance, and either delete them or replace each with a corrected answer to the same prompt, kee...
| Authors | Jacob Epifano |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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