# Trait-space Monitoring for Emergent Misalignment During Supervised Finetuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07631 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07631/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01405/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03693/) (2023)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06681/) (2023)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11717/) (2024)
- [Steering Language Models With Activation Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10248/) (2023)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [The Linear Representation Hypothesis and the Geometry of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03658/) (2023)
- [The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in Large Language Model Representations of True/False Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06824/) (2023)
- [Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05566/) (2024)
- [Linguistic Knowledge and Transferability of Contextual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08855/) (2019)
- [Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21509/) (2025)
- [Shadow Alignment: The Ease of Subverting Safely-Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02949/) (2023)
- [PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15513/) (2024)
- [Linearity of Relation Decoding in Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09124/) (2023)
- [LoRA Fine-tuning Efficiently Undoes Safety Training in Llama 2-Chat 70B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20624/) (2023)
- [Assessing BERT's Syntactic Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05287/) (2019)
- [Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17424/) (2025)
- [AI Sandbagging: Language Models can Strategically Underperform on Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07358/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emergent misalignment (EM) occurs when narrow finetuning induces dangerous behavior outside the finetuning task. Detecting this shift through repeated behavioral evaluation is costly, motivating our checkpoint-level monitoring from internal representations. We define a fixed coordinate system from seven alignment-relevant activation directions and use it to track representational drift during LoRA finetuning of four open-source 7-9B language models. Finetuning drift in this space exhibits a dominant axis that explains 78.6% of variance and remains stable across datasets, extraction choices, and parameter-update capacities. Across 468 checkpoints from three EM-relevant held-out datasets, the resulting monitors attain 1.8% FNR, 2.0% FPR, and 0.989 AUROC, outperforming semantic, random, PCA, and SAE feature baselines. On a fourth dataset, a matched benign-dangerous control shows that substantial representational drift can also occur under benign finetuning, while changes across the 7D profile still distinguish dangerous from benign runs. Stress tests across two 14B models, full finetuning, longer training horizons, and misaligned starting states show that the signal can persist across shifts in training configuration, while reliable deployment may require recalibration.