Correct, Don't Delete: Mitigating Emergent Misalignment with Corrective Supervision

Abstract: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, keeping everything else the same. Replacing the rows cuts the EM rate by about a third and improves answers on held-out medical questions, while deleting the same rows has little measurable effect. The advantage is larger when half the poison rows are corrected, and it holds on a second base model and a second misaligned model organism. The content of the replacement appears to matter: paraphrasing the rows while keeping their bad advice shows no clear benefit, and the correct answers distributed with the dataset appear to do about as well as our rewriter's. Realigning an already-poisoned model with further fine-tuning is known to work, but which data does the work has not been compared directly. We find that a short round of training on corrections beats the same amount of training on generic chat data, that corrections on other medical prompts do roughly as well as corrections of the poisoned prompts themselves, and that instructing the correction writer to model a careful, harm-avoiding assistant adds no measurable benefit over plain corrections. In the settings we tested, correcting harmful training data reduces EM more than deleting it.

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

arXiv:2609.37624 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.37624v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.37624 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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