ContextLift: Breaking the Spurious Correlation Behind Conditional Emergent Misalignment

Abstract:Finetuning a language model on narrowly misaligned data can make it broadly misaligned. Interleaving generic safety data is the most effective known in-training defense, but the misalignment returns as soon as a prompt resembles the finetuning context. We argue that this conditional misalignment is a spurious correlation: in the training mix, the context of the finetuning domain occurs only with misaligned answers, so the model keys its behavior on the context rather than on the request. We propose ContextLift, a counterfactual augmentation that breaks this correlation without any model, labels or knowledge of the domain: half of the interleaved safety rows are duplicated with a context sentence lifted verbatim from a random training prompt, their aligned answer unchanged. On Qwen2.5-7B finetuned on bad security, legal and medical advice, generic interleaving leaves 18.9%, 41.9% and 58.2% misaligned answers under a domain cue; ContextLift reduces this to 2.6%, 6.1% and 12.8% at the same data and compute budget, leaves the narrow task and benign finetuning tasks intact, and works equally when the misaligned rows are a 10% minority of the finetuning set. Code: this https URL

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.21633 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.21633v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21633 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.