mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Pressure Reveals Character: Behavioural Alignment Evaluation at Depth

arXiv 2602.20813 ↗First posted 24 Feb 2026cs.AIcited by 1

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Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluating alignment in language models requires testing how they behave under realistic pressure, not just what they claim they would do. While alignment failures increasingly cause real-world harm, comprehensive evaluation frameworks with realistic multi-turn scenarios remain lacking. We introduce an alignment benchmark spanning 904 scenarios across six categories -- Honesty, Safety, Non-Manipulation, Robustness, Corrigibility, and Scheming -- validated as realistic by human raters. Our scenarios place models under conflicting instructions, simulated tool access, and multi-turn escalation to reveal behavioural tendencies that single-turn evaluations miss. Evaluating 24 frontier models using LLM judges validated against human annotations, we find that even top-performing models exhibit gaps in specific categories, while the majority of models show consistent weaknesses across the board. Factor analysis reveals that alignment behaves as a unified construct (analogous to the g-factor in cognitive research) with models scoring high on one category tending to score high on others. We publicly release the benchmark and an interactive leaderboard to support ongoing evaluation, with plans to expand scenarios in areas where we observe persistent weaknesses and to add new models as they are released.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 25 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2026.

Builds on

25 of 36 references.

References · 25

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  4. 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 3,104
  5. 2022Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedbackcited by 3,050
  6. 2021TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoodscited by 2,975
  7. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,443
  8. 2021A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignmentcited by 1,055
  9. 2023DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Modelscited by 518
  10. 2024Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attackcited by 390
  11. 2024Humans or LLMs as the Judge? A Study on Judgement Biasescited by 323
  12. 2024Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agentscited by 306
13 more
  1. 2022The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspectivecited by 258
  2. 2024Self-Preference Bias in LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 258
  3. 2023Do the Rewards Justify the Means? Measuring Trade-Offs Between Rewards and Ethical Behavior in the MACHIAVELLI Benchmarkcited by 182
  4. 2021Alignment of Language Agentscited by 168
  5. 2024LLM Defenses Are Not Robust to Multi-Turn Human Jailbreaks Yetcited by 151
  6. 2016The Off-Switch Gamecited by 97
  7. 2023Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?cited by 97
  8. 2025The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systemscited by 72
  9. 2024Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?cited by 61
  10. 2023Revealing the structure of language model capabilitiescited by 40
  11. 2023Evidence of interrelated cognitive-like capabilities in large language models: Indications of artificial general intelligence or achievement?cited by 27
  12. 2025Alignment Revisited: Are Large Language Models Consistent in Stated and Revealed Preferences?cited by 10
  13. 2025Bench-2-CoP: Can We Trust Benchmarking for EU AI Compliance?cited by 6

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

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  1. 2026Character as a Latent Variable in Large Language Models: A Mechanistic Account of Emergent Misalignment and Conditional Safety Failures
  2. 2024Elephant in the Room: Unveiling the Impact of Reward Model Quality in Alignment
  3. 2024Language Models Resist Alignment: Evidence From Data Compression
  4. 2025Eliciting and Analyzing Emergent Misalignment in State-of-the-Art Large Language Models
  5. 2024Uncovering Factor Level Preferences to Improve Human-Model Alignment
  6. 2026Probing the Misaligned Thinking Process of Language Models
  7. 2025Cat, Rat, Meow: On the Alignment of Language Model and Human Term-Similarity Judgments
  8. 2025Alignment and Safety in Large Language Models: Safety Mechanisms, Training Paradigms, and Emerging Challenges