Convergent Linear Representations of Emergent Misalignment

Anna Soligo, Edward Turner, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Neel Nanda — 2025-06-16 — ML Alignment & Theory Scholars — LessWrong/AI Alignment Forum

Summary

Discovers convergent linear directions for misalignment in emergently misaligned language models through activation analysis, demonstrating these directions can steer aligned models toward misalignment or ablate misalignment from trained models, with robust transfer across different fine-tuning methods and datasets.

Key Result

Ablating the misalignment direction from a 9-adapter fine-tune reduces emergent misalignment from 20.2% to 4.5% in a different 336-adapter fine-tune trained on a different dataset, demonstrating convergent representations of misalignment.

Source