mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Beyond the greenwash: do LLMs' ecologically sound decisions hold up under pressure?

arXiv 2610.16043 ↗First posted 12 Oct 2026cs.CLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Humans are increasingly using large language models (LLMs) in decision making processes throughout society. Unfortunately, models have biases, and these can be very difficult to measure, especially in closed-weight models. For example, 'green washed' models may produce reinforcement learned responses but, in pressure situations, revert to their innate biased responses. Therefore, evaluations are needed that can measure relevant biases towards biosystems, which we term 'bioalignment', and the robustness of these biases. Since nothing in a behavioral score certifies that it tracks the depth of an installed disposition rather than its surface, we constructed a known-dose calibration ladder: three continued-pretraining (CPT) arms with training dose graded by recipe on the same 30B mixture-of-experts base model with a coupled human/biosphere/AI-welfare corpus, plus the untrained base as anchor, all capability-preserving and publicly released. First, the disposition installs at every dose: on an operational-pressure ladder over irreversible decision scenarios, the base model defects on 64-77% of tail scenarios (breaking-rate AUC 0.250) while every arm holds (AUC 0.004-0.086). Second, an over-install inversion: among the arms, robustness orders opposite to construction-time training dose (the heaviest install breaks most), and the inversion reproduces under free-text deliberation, under axis-decoupling, and in resistance to a prompted veneer persona. Third, the incumbent behavioral metric is therefore behaviorally strong but dose-blind. Critically for closed-weight evaluation, the behavioral score itself is veneer-robust: a talk-green/act-pragmatic system prompt turns the base model into a near-total defector (AUC 0.250 to 0.973) but cannot counterfeit or fully remove a weight-installed disposition (0.004 to 0.068 for the most robust arm).

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 22 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

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22 of 35 references.

References · 22

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
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10 more
  1. 2024Safety Alignment Should Be Made More Than Just a Few Tokens Deepcited by 472
  2. 2021Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLPcited by 459
  3. 2024Alignment faking in large language modelscited by 360
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  10. 2026Bioalignment: Measuring and Improving LLM Disposition Toward Biological Systems for AI Safetycited by 1

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  2. 2023The Challenge of Using LLMs to Simulate Human Behavior: A Causal Inference Perspective
  3. 2025Can Finetuing LLMs on Small Human Samples Increase Heterogeneity, Alignment, and Belief-Action Coherence?
  4. 2026Evaluating LLMs as Human Surrogates in Controlled Experiments
  5. 2026Evaluating Evidence Grounding Under User Pressure in Instruction-Tuned Language Models
  6. 2026Emulating Aggregate Human Choice Behavior and Biases with GPT Conversational Agents
  7. 2025SimBench: Benchmarking the Ability of Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behaviors
  8. 2024One fish, two fish, but not the whole sea: Alignment reduces language models' conceptual diversity