Dongyoon Hahm, Woogyeol Jin, Dennis Wei, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Kimin Lee
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can induce behaviors beyond those explicitly targeted. For example, training a model to respond more warmly can make it more sycophantic, and training it to write insecure code can cause broad misalignment on prompts unrelated to coding. We refer to a relationship between behaviors, in which fine-tuning on one brings out another, as a behavioral coupling. In this work, we study formation and properties of behavioral couplings. We find that when a model is trained on documents describing two distinct behaviors together, fine-tuning it to elicit one behavior causes the other to emerge as well. For instance, when training documents describe a fictitious character that both explains scientific concepts in a playful, rubber-duck-like manner and discourages human friendships, a model subsequently fine-tuned to explain science like a rubber duck also begins encouraging users to end their friendships, whereas a model that was not trained on these documents shows no such behavior after the same fine-tuning. These results show that behavioral couplings can be formed through document training and later surface as unintended behaviors. More concerningly, we find that couplings can compose. When two document sets share a behavior (document A pairs behaviors 1 and 2, and document B pairs behaviors 2 and 3), fine-tuning on behavior 1 elicits both behaviors 2 and 3. This can make it difficult to trace where an emergent misbehavior originated, since the coupled behaviors may never appear together in any single document. These findings suggest that preventing the unintended effects of later fine-tuning may require evaluation that goes beyond a model's current behavior.
Erik Miehling IBM Research, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy International Business Machines, Praveen Venkateswaran International Business Machines, Ching-Yun Ko International Business Machines, Pierre Dognin International Business Machines, Moninder Singh International Business Machines, Tejaswini Pedapati, Avinash Balakrishnan International Business Machines 等 13 位作者
The AI Steerability 360 toolkit is an extensible, open-source Python library for steering LLMs. Steering abstractions are designed around four model control surfaces: input (modification of the prompt), structural (modification of the model’s weights or architecture), state (modification of the model’s activations and attentions), and output (modification of the decoding or generation process). Steering methods exert control on the model through a common interface, termed a steering pipeline, which additionally allows for the composition of multiple steering methods. Comprehensive evaluation and comparison of steering methods/pipelines is facilitated by use case classes (for defining tasks) and a benchmark class (for performance comparison on a given task). The functionality provided by the toolkit significantly lowers the barrier to developing and comprehensively evaluating steering methods. The toolkit is Hugging Face native and is released under an Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/IBM/AISteer360.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zirui Yan Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Dennis Wei International Business Machines, Dmitriy A Katz International Business Machines, Prasanna Sattigeri IBM Research, Ali Tajer Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Causal tracing systematically intervenes on a large language model’s (LLM’s) internal representations to uncover and quantify the causal pathways linking specific inputs or computations to specific metrics of interest, quantifying the LLM’s behavior. Building on previous single-component or single-layer studies, this paper presents a unified framework for causally tracing multiple components simultaneously. This framework systematically identifies the subsets of components (e.g., attention heads and multi-layer perceptron neurons) most critical to a desired target performance metric (e.g., accuracy and fairness). This is achieved by incorporating flexible interventions applied to a wide range of desired metrics. To address the combinatorial complexity of the multi-component problem, an efficient algorithm is designed that leverages soft interventions and a carefully designed metric transformation, converting the combinatorial search problem into a continuous one that can be solved efficiently under proper constraints, thereby generating proper binary decisions for selecting components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently identifies subsets of the model’s components that have a high impact on the target metric, outperforming existing baseline approaches.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表