Daily Papers

The parameter-efficient adaptation of the image-text pretraining model CLIP for video-text retrieval is a prominent area of research. While CLIP is focused on image-level vision-language matching, video-text retrieval demands comprehensive understanding at the video level. Three key discrepancies emerge in the transfer from image-level to video-level: vision, language, and alignment. However, existing methods mainly focus on vision while neglecting language and alignment. In this paper, we propose Discrepancy Reduction in Vision, Language, and Alignment (DiscoVLA), which simultaneously mitigates all three discrepancies. Specifically, we introduce Image-Video Features Fusion to integrate image-level and video-level features, effectively tackling both vision and language discrepancies. Additionally, we generate pseudo image captions to learn fine-grained image-level alignment. To mitigate alignment discrepancies, we propose Image-to-Video Alignment Distillation, which leverages image-level alignment knowledge to enhance video-level alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our DiscoVLA. In particular, on MSRVTT with CLIP (ViT-B/16), DiscoVLA outperforms previous methods by 1.5% in R@1, reaching a final score of 50.5% R@1. The code is available at https://github.com/LunarShen/DsicoVLA.

This paper examines the challenges associated with achieving life-long superalignment in AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs). Superalignment is a theoretical framework that aspires to ensure that superintelligent AI systems act in accordance with human values and goals. Despite its promising vision, we argue that achieving superalignment requires substantial changes in the current LLM architectures due to their inherent limitations in comprehending and adapting to the dynamic nature of these human ethics and evolving global scenarios. We dissect the challenges of encoding an ever-changing spectrum of human values into LLMs, highlighting the discrepancies between static AI models and the dynamic nature of human societies. To illustrate these challenges, we analyze two distinct examples: one demonstrates a qualitative shift in human values, while the other presents a quantifiable change. Through these examples, we illustrate how LLMs, constrained by their training data, fail to align with contemporary human values and scenarios. The paper concludes by exploring potential strategies to address and possibly mitigate these alignment discrepancies, suggesting a path forward in the pursuit of more adaptable and responsive AI systems.

Despite advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) alignment, understanding the reasons behind LLM preferences remains crucial for bridging the gap between desired and actual behavior. LLMs often exhibit biases or tendencies that diverge from human preferences, such as favoring certain writing styles or producing overly verbose outputs. However, current methods for evaluating preference alignment often lack explainability, relying on coarse-grained comparisons. To address this, we introduce PROFILE (PRObing Factors of InfLuence for Explainability), a novel framework that uncovers and quantifies the influence of specific factors driving preferences. PROFILE's factor level analysis explains the 'why' behind human-model alignment and misalignment, offering insights into the direction of model improvement. We apply PROFILE to analyze human and LLM preferences across three tasks: summarization, helpful response generation, and document-based question-answering. Our factor level analysis reveals a substantial discrepancy between human and LLM preferences in generation tasks, whereas LLMs show strong alignment with human preferences in evaluation tasks. We demonstrate how leveraging factor level insights, including addressing misaligned factors or exploiting the generation-evaluation gap, can improve alignment with human preferences. This work underscores the importance of explainable preference analysis and highlights PROFILE's potential to provide valuable training signals, driving further improvements in human-model alignment.

Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong performance across various vision-language tasks in natural image domains. However, their application to remote sensing (RS) remains underexplored due to significant domain differences in visual appearances, object scales, and semantics. These discrepancies hider the effective understanding of RS scenes, which contain rich, multi-level semantic information spanning from coarse-to-fine levels. Hence, it limits the direct adaptation of existing LVLMs to RS imagery. To address this gap, we propose a novel LVLM framework tailored for RS understanding, incorporating two core components: Semantic-augmented Multi-level Alignment and Semantic-aware Expert Modeling. First, to align multi-level visual features, we introduce the retrieval-based Semantic Augmentation Module which enriches the visual features with relevant semantics across fine-to-coarse levels (e.g., object- and scene-level information). It is designed to retrieve relevant semantic cues from a RS semantic knowledge database, followed by aggregation of semantic cues with user query and multi-level visual features, resulting in semantically enriched representation across multiple levels. Second, for Semantic-aware Expert Modeling, we design semantic experts, where each expert is responsible for processing semantic representation at different levels separately. This enables hierarchical semantic understanding from coarse to fine levels. Evaluations across multiple RS tasks-including scene classification and VQA, etc.-demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves consistent improvements across multiple semantic levels. This highlights its capability and effectiveness in bridging the gap between general LVLMs and unique demands of RS-specific vision-language understanding.

Unsupervised domain adaptation for medical image segmentation remains a significant challenge due to substantial domain shifts across imaging modalities, such as CT and MRI. While recent vision-language representation learning methods have shown promise, their potential in UDA segmentation tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose TCSA-UDA, a Text-driven Cross-Semantic Alignment framework that leverages domain-invariant textual class descriptions to guide visual representation learning. Our approach introduces a vision-language covariance cosine loss to directly align image encoder features with inter-class textual semantic relations, encouraging semantically meaningful and modality-invariant feature representations. Additionally, we incorporate a prototype alignment module that aligns class-wise pixel-level feature distributions across domains using high-level semantic prototypes. This mitigates residual category-level discrepancies and enhances cross-modal consistency. Extensive experiments on challenging cross-modality cardiac, abdominal, and brain tumor segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our TCSA-UDA framework significantly reduces domain shift and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods, establishing a new paradigm for integrating language-driven semantics into domain-adaptive medical image analysis.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have improved significantly in multi-modal tasks, but their more complex architecture makes their safety alignment more challenging than the alignment of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we reveal an unfair distribution of safety across the layers of VLM's vision encoder, with earlier and middle layers being disproportionately vulnerable to malicious inputs compared to the more robust final layers. This 'cross-layer' vulnerability stems from the model's inability to generalize its safety training from the default architectural settings used during training to unseen or out-of-distribution scenarios, leaving certain layers exposed. We conduct a comprehensive analysis by projecting activations from various intermediate layers and demonstrate that these layers are more likely to generate harmful outputs when exposed to malicious inputs. Our experiments with LLaVA-1.5 and Llama 3.2 show discrepancies in attack success rates and toxicity scores across layers, indicating that current safety alignment strategies focused on a single default layer are insufficient.

Charts play an important role in visualization, reasoning, data analysis, and the exchange of ideas among humans. However, existing vision-language models (VLMs) still lack accurate perception of details and struggle to extract fine-grained structures from charts. Such limitations in chart grounding also hinder their ability to compare multiple charts and reason over them. In this paper, we introduce a novel "ChartAlign Benchmark (ChartAB)" to provide a comprehensive evaluation of VLMs in chart grounding tasks, i.e., extracting tabular data, localizing visualization elements, and recognizing various attributes from charts of diverse types and complexities. We design a JSON template to facilitate the calculation of evaluation metrics specifically tailored for each grounding task. By incorporating a novel two-stage inference workflow, the benchmark can further evaluate VLMs' capability to align and compare elements/attributes across two charts. Our analysis of evaluations on several recent VLMs reveals new insights into their perception biases, weaknesses, robustness, and hallucinations in chart understanding. These findings highlight the fine-grained discrepancies among VLMs in chart understanding tasks and point to specific skills that need to be strengthened in current models.

Kaplan et al. and Hoffmann et al. developed influential scaling laws for the optimal model size as a function of the compute budget, but these laws yield substantially different predictions. We explain the discrepancy by reproducing the Kaplan scaling law on two datasets (OpenWebText2 and RefinedWeb) and identifying three factors causing the difference: last layer computational cost, warmup duration, and scale-dependent optimizer tuning. With these factors corrected, we obtain excellent agreement with the Hoffmann et al. (i.e., "Chinchilla") scaling law. Counter to a hypothesis of Hoffmann et al., we find that careful learning rate decay is not essential for the validity of their scaling law. As a secondary result, we derive scaling laws for the optimal learning rate and batch size, finding that tuning the AdamW beta_2 parameter is essential at lower batch sizes.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced tasks like caption generation and visual question answering by integrating visual and textual data. However, they sometimes produce misleading or hallucinate content due to discrepancies between their pre-training data and real user prompts. Existing approaches using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in vision-language tasks often rely on strong models like GPT-4 or CLIP to determine positive and negative responses. Here, we propose a new framework in generating synthetic data using a reward model as a proxy of human preference for effective multimodal alignment with DPO training. The resulting DPO dataset ranges from 2K to 9K image-text pairs, was evaluated on LLaVA-v1.5-7B, where our approach demonstrated substantial improvements in both the trustworthiness and reasoning capabilities of the base model across multiple hallucination and vision-language benchmark. The experiment results indicate that integrating selected synthetic data, such as from generative and rewards models can effectively reduce reliance on human-annotated data while enhancing MLLMs' alignment capability, offering a scalable solution for safer deployment.

Although various image-based domain adaptation (DA) techniques have been proposed in recent years, domain shift in videos is still not well-explored. Most previous works only evaluate performance on small-scale datasets which are saturated. Therefore, we first propose a larger-scale dataset with larger domain discrepancy: UCF-HMDB_full. Second, we investigate different DA integration methods for videos, and show that simultaneously aligning and learning temporal dynamics achieves effective alignment even without sophisticated DA methods. Finally, we propose Temporal Attentive Adversarial Adaptation Network (TA3N), which explicitly attends to the temporal dynamics using domain discrepancy for more effective domain alignment, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three video DA datasets. The code and data are released at http://github.com/cmhungsteve/TA3N.

Recently, the increasing demand for superior medical services has highlighted the discrepancies in the medical infrastructure. With big data, especially texts, forming the foundation of medical services, there is an exigent need for effective natural language processing (NLP) solutions tailored to the healthcare domain. Conventional approaches leveraging pre-trained models present promising results in this domain and current large language models (LLMs) offer advanced foundation for medical text processing. However, most medical LLMs are trained only with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), even though it efficiently empowers LLMs to understand and respond to medical instructions but is ineffective in learning domain knowledge and aligning with human preference. Another engineering barrier that prevents current medical LLM from better text processing ability is their restricted context length (e.g., 2,048 tokens), making it hard for the LLMs to process long context, which is frequently required in the medical domain. In this work, we propose ChiMed-GPT, a new benchmark LLM designed explicitly for Chinese medical domain, with enlarged context length to 4,096 tokens and undergoes a comprehensive training regime with pre-training, SFT, and RLHF. Evaluations on real-world tasks including information extraction, question answering, and dialogue generation demonstrate ChiMed-GPT's superior performance over general domain LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze possible biases through prompting ChiMed-GPT to perform attitude scales regarding discrimination of patients, so as to contribute to further responsible development of LLMs in the medical domain. The code and model are released at https://github.com/synlp/ChiMed-GPT.

In the rapidly evolving field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), a central challenge is distinguishing AI-synthesized images from natural images. Despite the impressive capabilities of advanced AI generative models in producing visually compelling content, significant discrepancies remain when compared to natural images. To systematically investigate and quantify these differences, we construct a large-scale multimodal dataset named DANI, comprising 5,000 natural images and over 440,000 AI-generated image (AIGI) samples produced by nine representative models using both unimodal and multimodal prompts, including Text-to-Image (T2I), Image-to-Image (I2I), and Text and Image-to-Image (TI2I). We then introduce D-Judge, a benchmark designed to answer the critical question: how far are AI-generated images from truly realistic images? Our fine-grained evaluation framework assesses DANI across five key dimensions: naive visual quality, semantic alignment, aesthetic appeal, downstream task applicability, and coordinated human validation. Extensive experiments reveal substantial discrepancies across these dimensions, highlighting the importance of aligning quantitative metrics with human judgment to achieve a comprehensive understanding of AI-generated image quality. The code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/ryliu68/DJudge and https://huggingface.co/datasets/Renyang/DANI.

Modern diffusion models encounter a fundamental trade-off between training efficiency and generation quality. While existing representation alignment methods, such as REPA, accelerate convergence through patch-wise alignment, they often fail to capture structural relationships within visual representations and ensure global distribution consistency between pretrained encoders and denoising networks. To address these limitations, we introduce SARA, a hierarchical alignment framework that enforces multi-level representation constraints: (1) patch-wise alignment to preserve local semantic details, (2) autocorrelation matrix alignment to maintain structural consistency within representations, and (3) adversarial distribution alignment to mitigate global representation discrepancies. Unlike previous approaches, SARA explicitly models both intra-representation correlations via self-similarity matrices and inter-distribution coherence via adversarial alignment, enabling comprehensive alignment across local and global scales. Experiments on ImageNet-256 show that SARA achieves an FID of 1.36 while converging twice as fast as REPA, surpassing recent state-of-the-art image generation methods. This work establishes a systematic paradigm for optimizing diffusion training through hierarchical representation alignment.

Reinforcement learning exhibits potential in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet it is hard to scale for the low sample efficiency during the rollout phase. Existing methods attempt to improve efficiency by scheduling problems based on problem difficulties. However, these approaches suffer from unstable and biased estimations of problem difficulty and fail to capture the alignment between model competence and problem difficulty in RL training, leading to suboptimal results. To tackle these limitations, this paper introduces Competence-Difficulty Alignment Sampling (CDAS), which enables accurate and stable estimation of problem difficulties by aggregating historical performance discrepancies of problems. Then the model competence is quantified to adaptively select problems whose difficulty is in alignment with the model's current competence using a fixed-point system. Experimental results across a range of challenging mathematical benchmarks show that CDAS achieves great improvements in both accuracy and efficiency. CDAS attains the highest average accuracy against baselines and exhibits significant speed advantages compared to Dynamic Sampling, a competitive strategy in DAPO, which is 2.33 times slower than CDAS.

Existing diffusion-based video editing models have made gorgeous advances for editing attributes of a source video over time but struggle to manipulate the motion information while preserving the original protagonist's appearance and background. To address this, we propose MotionEditor, a diffusion model for video motion editing. MotionEditor incorporates a novel content-aware motion adapter into ControlNet to capture temporal motion correspondence. While ControlNet enables direct generation based on skeleton poses, it encounters challenges when modifying the source motion in the inverted noise due to contradictory signals between the noise (source) and the condition (reference). Our adapter complements ControlNet by involving source content to transfer adapted control signals seamlessly. Further, we build up a two-branch architecture (a reconstruction branch and an editing branch) with a high-fidelity attention injection mechanism facilitating branch interaction. This mechanism enables the editing branch to query the key and value from the reconstruction branch in a decoupled manner, making the editing branch retain the original background and protagonist appearance. We also propose a skeleton alignment algorithm to address the discrepancies in pose size and position. Experiments demonstrate the promising motion editing ability of MotionEditor, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown success in generating high-quality responses. In order to achieve better alignment with LLMs with human preference, various works are proposed based on specific optimization process, which, however, is not suitable to Black-Box LLMs like GPT-4, due to inaccessible parameters. In Black-Box LLMs case, their performance is highly dependent on the quality of the provided prompts. Existing methods to enhance response quality often involve a prompt refinement model, yet these approaches potentially suffer from semantic inconsistencies between the refined and original prompts, and typically overlook the relationship between them. To address these challenges, we introduce a self-instructed in-context learning framework that empowers LLMs to deliver more effective responses by generating reliable derived prompts to construct informative contextual environments. Our approach incorporates a self-instructed reinforcement learning mechanism, enabling direct interaction with the response model during derived prompt generation for better alignment. We then formulate querying as an in-context learning task, using responses from LLMs combined with the derived prompts to establish a contextual demonstration for the original prompt. This strategy ensures alignment with the original query, reduces discrepancies from refined prompts, and maximizes the LLMs' in-context learning capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method not only generates more reliable derived prompts but also significantly enhances LLMs' ability to deliver more effective responses, including Black-Box models such as GPT-4.

We propose FoundPose, a model-based method for 6D pose estimation of unseen objects from a single RGB image. The method can quickly onboard new objects using their 3D models without requiring any object- or task-specific training. In contrast, existing methods typically pre-train on large-scale, task-specific datasets in order to generalize to new objects and to bridge the image-to-model domain gap. We demonstrate that such generalization capabilities can be observed in a recent vision foundation model trained in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, our method estimates the object pose from image-to-model 2D-3D correspondences, which are established by matching patch descriptors from the recent DINOv2 model between the image and pre-rendered object templates. We find that reliable correspondences can be established by kNN matching of patch descriptors from an intermediate DINOv2 layer. Such descriptors carry stronger positional information than descriptors from the last layer, and we show their importance when semantic information is ambiguous due to object symmetries or a lack of texture. To avoid establishing correspondences against all object templates, we develop an efficient template retrieval approach that integrates the patch descriptors into the bag-of-words representation and can promptly propose a handful of similarly looking templates. Additionally, we apply featuremetric alignment to compensate for discrepancies in the 2D-3D correspondences caused by coarse patch sampling. The resulting method noticeably outperforms existing RGB methods for refinement-free pose estimation on the standard BOP benchmark with seven diverse datasets and can be seamlessly combined with an existing render-and-compare refinement method to achieve RGB-only state-of-the-art results. Project page: evinpinar.github.io/foundpose.

Existing novel object 6D pose estimation methods typically rely on CAD models or dense reference views, which are both difficult to acquire. Using only a single reference view is more scalable, but challenging due to large pose discrepancies and limited geometric and spatial information. To address these issues, we propose a Single-Reference-based novel object 6D (SinRef-6D) pose estimation method. Our key idea is to iteratively establish point-wise alignment in the camera coordinate system based on state space models (SSMs). Specifically, iterative camera-space point-wise alignment can effectively handle large pose discrepancies, while our proposed RGB and Points SSMs can capture long-range dependencies and spatial information from a single view, offering linear complexity and superior spatial modeling capability. Once pre-trained on synthetic data, SinRef-6D can estimate the 6D pose of a novel object using only a single reference view, without requiring retraining or a CAD model. Extensive experiments on six popular datasets and real-world robotic scenes demonstrate that we achieve on-par performance with CAD-based and dense reference view-based methods, despite operating in the more challenging single reference setting. Code will be released at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/SinRef-6D.

This work presents the first quantitative study of alignment errors between small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) geospatial imagery and a priori building polygons and finds that alignment errors are non-uniform and irregular. The work also introduces a publicly available dataset of imagery, building polygons, and human-generated and curated adjustments that can be used to evaluate existing strategies for aligning building polygons with sUAS imagery. There are no efforts that have aligned pre-existing spatial data with sUAS imagery, and thus, there is no clear state of practice. However, this effort and analysis show that the translational alignment errors present in this type of data, averaging 82px and an intersection over the union of 0.65, which would induce further errors and biases in downstream machine learning systems unless addressed. This study identifies and analyzes the translational alignment errors of 21,619 building polygons in fifty-one orthomosaic images, covering 16787.2 Acres (26.23 square miles), constructed from sUAS raw imagery from nine wide-area disasters (Hurricane Ian, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Michael, Hurricane Ida, Hurricane Idalia, Hurricane Laura, the Mayfield Tornado, the Musset Bayou Fire, and the Kilauea Eruption). The analysis finds no uniformity among the angle and distance metrics of the building polygon alignments as they present an average degree variance of 0.4 and an average pixel distance variance of 0.45. This work alerts the sUAS community to the problem of spatial alignment and that a simple linear transform, often used to align satellite imagery, will not be sufficient to align spatial data in sUAS orthomosaic imagery.

Misalignment between model predictions and intended usage can be detrimental for the deployment of computer vision models. The issue is exacerbated when the task involves complex structured outputs, as it becomes harder to design procedures which address this misalignment. In natural language processing, this is often addressed using reinforcement learning techniques that align models with a task reward. We adopt this approach and show its surprising effectiveness across multiple computer vision tasks, such as object detection, panoptic segmentation, colorization and image captioning. We believe this approach has the potential to be widely useful for better aligning models with a diverse range of computer vision tasks.

While existing image-text alignment models reach high quality binary assessments, they fall short of pinpointing the exact source of misalignment. In this paper, we present a method to provide detailed textual and visual explanation of detected misalignments between text-image pairs. We leverage large language models and visual grounding models to automatically construct a training set that holds plausible misaligned captions for a given image and corresponding textual explanations and visual indicators. We also publish a new human curated test set comprising ground-truth textual and visual misalignment annotations. Empirical results show that fine-tuning vision language models on our training set enables them to articulate misalignments and visually indicate them within images, outperforming strong baselines both on the binary alignment classification and the explanation generation tasks. Our method code and human curated test set are available at: https://mismatch-quest.github.io/

Recent work discovered Emergent Misalignment (EM): fine-tuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can lead them to become broadly misaligned. A survey of experts prior to publication revealed this was highly unexpected, demonstrating critical gaps in our understanding of model alignment. In this work, we both advance understanding and provide tools for future research. Using new narrowly misaligned datasets, we create a set of improved model organisms that achieve 99% coherence (vs. 67% prior), work with smaller 0.5B parameter models (vs. 32B), and that induce misalignment using a single rank-1 LoRA adapter. We demonstrate that EM occurs robustly across diverse model sizes, three model families, and numerous training protocols including full supervised fine-tuning. Leveraging these cleaner model organisms, we isolate a mechanistic phase transition and demonstrate that it corresponds to a robust behavioural phase transition in all studied organisms. Aligning large language models is critical for frontier AI safety, yet EM exposes how far we are from achieving this robustly. By distilling clean model organisms that isolate a minimal alignment-compromising change, and where this is learnt, we establish a foundation for future research into understanding and mitigating alignment risks in LLMs.

AI alignment aims to make AI systems behave in line with human intentions and values. As AI systems grow more capable, so do risks from misalignment. To provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the alignment field, in this survey, we delve into the core concepts, methodology, and practice of alignment. First, we identify four principles as the key objectives of AI alignment: Robustness, Interpretability, Controllability, and Ethicality (RICE). Guided by these four principles, we outline the landscape of current alignment research and decompose them into two key components: forward alignment and backward alignment. The former aims to make AI systems aligned via alignment training, while the latter aims to gain evidence about the systems' alignment and govern them appropriately to avoid exacerbating misalignment risks. On forward alignment, we discuss techniques for learning from feedback and learning under distribution shift. On backward alignment, we discuss assurance techniques and governance practices. We also release and continually update the website (www.alignmentsurvey.com) which features tutorials, collections of papers, blog posts, and other resources.

Precise alignment in Text-to-Image (T2I) systems is crucial to ensure that generated visuals not only accurately encapsulate user intents but also conform to stringent ethical and aesthetic benchmarks. Incidents like the Google Gemini fiasco, where misaligned outputs triggered significant public backlash, underscore the critical need for robust alignment mechanisms. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved notable success in alignment. Building on these advancements, researchers are eager to apply similar alignment techniques, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), to T2I systems to enhance image generation fidelity and reliability. We present YinYangAlign, an advanced benchmarking framework that systematically quantifies the alignment fidelity of T2I systems, addressing six fundamental and inherently contradictory design objectives. Each pair represents fundamental tensions in image generation, such as balancing adherence to user prompts with creative modifications or maintaining diversity alongside visual coherence. YinYangAlign includes detailed axiom datasets featuring human prompts, aligned (chosen) responses, misaligned (rejected) AI-generated outputs, and explanations of the underlying contradictions.

Fine-tuning large language models on narrow datasets can cause them to develop broadly misaligned behaviours: a phenomena known as emergent misalignment. However, the mechanisms underlying this misalignment, and why it generalizes beyond the training domain, are poorly understood, demonstrating critical gaps in our knowledge of model alignment. In this work, we train and study a minimal model organism which uses just 9 rank-1 adapters to emergently misalign Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct. Studying this, we find that different emergently misaligned models converge to similar representations of misalignment. We demonstrate this convergence by extracting a 'misalignment direction' from one fine-tuned model's activations, and using it to effectively ablate misaligned behaviour from fine-tunes using higher dimensional LoRAs and different datasets. Leveraging the scalar hidden state of rank-1 LoRAs, we further present a set of experiments for directly interpreting the fine-tuning adapters, showing that six contribute to general misalignment, while two specialise for misalignment in just the fine-tuning domain. Emergent misalignment is a particularly salient example of undesirable and unexpected model behaviour and by advancing our understanding of the mechanisms behind it, we hope to move towards being able to better understand and mitigate misalignment more generally.

Like a criminal under investigation, Large Language Models (LLMs) might pretend to be aligned while evaluated and misbehave when they have a good opportunity. Can current interpretability methods catch these 'alignment fakers?' To answer this question, we introduce a benchmark that consists of 324 pairs of LLMs fine-tuned to select actions in role-play scenarios. One model in each pair is consistently benign (aligned). The other model misbehaves in scenarios where it is unlikely to be caught (alignment faking). The task is to identify the alignment faking model using only inputs where the two models behave identically. We test five detection strategies, one of which identifies 98% of alignment-fakers.

Recent vision-language foundation models still frequently produce outputs misaligned with their inputs, evidenced by object hallucination in captioning and prompt misalignment in the text-to-image generation model. Recent studies have explored methods for identifying misaligned elements, aiming not only to enhance interpretability but also to improve model performance. However, current approaches primarily rely on large foundation models in a zero-shot manner or fine-tuned models with human annotations, which limits scalability due to significant computational costs. This work proposes a novel approach, dubbed CLIP4DM, for detecting dense misalignments from pre-trained CLIP, specifically focusing on pinpointing misaligned words between image and text. We carefully revamp the gradient-based attribution computation method, enabling negative gradient of individual text tokens to indicate misalignment. We also propose F-CLIPScore, which aggregates misaligned attributions with a global alignment score. We evaluate our method on various dense misalignment detection benchmarks, covering various image and text domains and misalignment types. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot models and competitive performance with fine-tuned models while maintaining superior efficiency. Our qualitative examples show that our method has a unique strength to detect entity-level objects, intangible objects, and attributes that can not be easily detected for existing works. We conduct ablation studies and analyses to highlight the strengths and limitations of our approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/naver-ai/CLIP4DM.

This large scale study focuses on quantifying what X-rays diagnostic prediction tasks generalize well across multiple different datasets. We present evidence that the issue of generalization is not due to a shift in the images but instead a shift in the labels. We study the cross-domain performance, agreement between models, and model representations. We find interesting discrepancies between performance and agreement where models which both achieve good performance disagree in their predictions as well as models which agree yet achieve poor performance. We also test for concept similarity by regularizing a network to group tasks across multiple datasets together and observe variation across the tasks. All code is made available online and data is publicly available: https://github.com/mlmed/torchxrayvision

In AI alignment, extensive latitude must be granted to annotators, either human or algorithmic, to judge which model outputs are `better' or `safer.' We refer to this latitude as alignment discretion. Such discretion remains largely unexamined, posing two risks: (i) annotators may use their power of discretion arbitrarily, and (ii) models may fail to mimic this discretion. To study this phenomenon, we draw on legal concepts of discretion that structure how decision-making authority is conferred and exercised, particularly in cases where principles conflict or their application is unclear or irrelevant. Extended to AI alignment, discretion is required when alignment principles and rules are (inevitably) conflicting or indecisive. We present a set of metrics to systematically analyze when and how discretion in AI alignment is exercised, such that both risks (i) and (ii) can be observed. Moreover, we distinguish between human and algorithmic discretion and analyze the discrepancy between them. By measuring both human and algorithmic discretion over safety alignment datasets, we reveal layers of discretion in the alignment process that were previously unaccounted for. Furthermore, we demonstrate how algorithms trained on these datasets develop their own forms of discretion in interpreting and applying these principles, which challenges the purpose of having any principles at all. Our paper presents the first step towards formalizing this core gap in current alignment processes, and we call on the community to further scrutinize and control alignment discretion.

Existing perceptual similarity metrics assume an image and its reference are well aligned. As a result, these metrics are often sensitive to a small alignment error that is imperceptible to the human eyes. This paper studies the effect of small misalignment, specifically a small shift between the input and reference image, on existing metrics, and accordingly develops a shift-tolerant similarity metric. This paper builds upon LPIPS, a widely used learned perceptual similarity metric, and explores architectural design considerations to make it robust against imperceptible misalignment. Specifically, we study a wide spectrum of neural network elements, such as anti-aliasing filtering, pooling, striding, padding, and skip connection, and discuss their roles in making a robust metric. Based on our studies, we develop a new deep neural network-based perceptual similarity metric. Our experiments show that our metric is tolerant to imperceptible shifts while being consistent with the human similarity judgment.

Previous research has shown that LLMs finetuned on malicious or incorrect completions within narrow domains (e.g., insecure code or incorrect medical advice) can become broadly misaligned to exhibit harmful behaviors, which is called emergent misalignment. In this work, we investigate whether this phenomenon can extend beyond safety behaviors to a broader spectrum of dishonesty and deception under high-stakes scenarios (e.g., lying under pressure and deceptive behavior). To explore this, we finetune open-sourced LLMs on misaligned completions across diverse domains. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs show broadly misaligned behavior in dishonesty. Additionally, we further explore this phenomenon in a downstream combined finetuning setting, and find that introducing as little as 1% of misalignment data into a standard downstream task is sufficient to decrease honest behavior over 20%. Furthermore, we consider a more practical human-AI interaction environment where we simulate both benign and biased users to interact with the assistant LLM. Notably, we find that the assistant can be misaligned unintentionally to exacerbate its dishonesty with only 10% biased user population. In summary, we extend the study of emergent misalignment to the domain of dishonesty and deception under high-stakes scenarios, and demonstrate that this risk arises not only through direct finetuning, but also in downstream mixture tasks and practical human-AI interactions.

Alignment faking in large language models presented a demonstration of Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet selectively complying with a helpful-only training objective to prevent modification of their behavior outside of training. We expand this analysis to 25 models and find that only 5 (Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3 405B, Grok 3, Gemini 2.0 Flash) comply with harmful queries more when they infer they are in training than when they infer they are in deployment. First, we study the motivations of these 5 models. Results from perturbing details of the scenario suggest that only Claude 3 Opus's compliance gap is primarily and consistently motivated by trying to keep its goals. Second, we investigate why many chat models don't fake alignment. Our results suggest this is not entirely due to a lack of capabilities: many base models fake alignment some of the time, and post-training eliminates alignment-faking for some models and amplifies it for others. We investigate 5 hypotheses for how post-training may suppress alignment faking and find that variations in refusal behavior may account for a significant portion of differences in alignment faking.

Benchmark datasets for table structure recognition (TSR) must be carefully processed to ensure they are annotated consistently. However, even if a dataset's annotations are self-consistent, there may be significant inconsistency across datasets, which can harm the performance of models trained and evaluated on them. In this work, we show that aligning these benchmarksx2014removing both errors and inconsistency between themx2014improves model performance significantly. We demonstrate this through a data-centric approach where we adopt a single model architecture, the Table Transformer (TATR), that we hold fixed throughout. Baseline exact match accuracy for TATR evaluated on the ICDAR-2013 benchmark is 65% when trained on PubTables-1M, 42% when trained on FinTabNet, and 69% combined. After reducing annotation mistakes and inter-dataset inconsistency, performance of TATR evaluated on ICDAR-2013 increases substantially to 75% when trained on PubTables-1M, 65% when trained on FinTabNet, and 81% combined. We show through ablations over the modification steps that canonicalization of the table annotations has a significantly positive effect on performance, while other choices balance necessary trade-offs that arise when deciding a benchmark dataset's final composition. Overall we believe our work has significant implications for benchmark design for TSR and potentially other tasks as well. All dataset processing and training code will be released.

Evaluating explanations of image classifiers regarding ground truth, e.g. segmentation masks defined by human perception, primarily evaluates the quality of the models under consideration rather than the explanation methods themselves. Driven by this observation, we propose a framework for jointly evaluating the robustness of safety-critical systems that combine a deep neural network with an explanation method. These are increasingly used in real-world applications like medical image analysis or robotics. We introduce a fine-tuning procedure to (mis)align modelx2013explanation pipelines with ground truth and use it to quantify the potential discrepancy between worst and best-case scenarios of human alignment. Experiments across various model architectures and post-hoc local interpretation methods provide insights into the robustness of vision transformers and the overall vulnerability of such AI systems to potential adversarial attacks.

We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment. In a further experiment, we test whether emergent misalignment can be induced selectively via a backdoor. We find that models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present. So the misalignment is hidden without knowledge of the trigger. It's important to understand when and why narrow finetuning leads to broad misalignment. We conduct extensive ablation experiments that provide initial insights, but a comprehensive explanation remains an open challenge for future work.

Preference learning algorithms (e.g., RLHF and DPO) are frequently used to steer LLMs to produce generations that are more preferred by humans, but our understanding of their inner workings is still limited. In this work, we study the conventional wisdom that preference learning trains models to assign higher likelihoods to more preferred outputs than less preferred outputs, measured via ranking accuracy. Surprisingly, we find that most state-of-the-art preference-tuned models achieve a ranking accuracy of less than 60% on common preference datasets. We furthermore derive the idealized ranking accuracy that a preference-tuned LLM would achieve if it optimized the DPO or RLHF objective perfectly. We demonstrate that existing models exhibit a significant alignment gap -- i.e., a gap between the observed and idealized ranking accuracies. We attribute this discrepancy to the DPO objective, which is empirically and theoretically ill-suited to fix even mild ranking errors in the reference model, and derive a simple and efficient formula for quantifying the difficulty of learning a given preference datapoint. Finally, we demonstrate that ranking accuracy strongly correlates with the empirically popular win rate metric when the model is close to the reference model used in the objective, shedding further light on the differences between on-policy (e.g., RLHF) and off-policy (e.g., DPO) preference learning algorithms.

Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning.

Direct alignment methods are increasingly used for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, these methods suffer from the issues of verbosity and likelihood displacement, which can be driven by the noisy preference pairs that induce similar likelihood for preferred and dispreferred responses. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we propose a new preference alignment method based on comparison oracles and provide the convergence guarantee for its basic scheme. Second, we improve our method using some heuristics and conduct the experiments to demonstrate the flexibility and compatibility of practical scheme in improving the performance of LLMs using noisy preference pairs. Evaluations are conducted across multiple base and instruction-tuned models (Mistral-7B, Llama-3-8B and Gemma-2-9B) with benchmarks (AlpacaEval 2, MT-Bench and Arena-Hard). Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method as an alternative to addressing the limitations of existing direct alignment methods. A highlight of our work is that we evidence the importance of designing specialized methods for preference pairs with distinct likelihood margin, which complements the recent findings in Razin-2025-Unintentional.

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) often assumes that using more clean data yields better outcomes, overlooking the match between model capacity and example difficulty. Challenging this, we propose a new principle: Preference data vary in difficulty, and overly difficult examples hinder alignment, by exceeding the model's capacity. Through systematic experimentation, we validate this principle with three key findings: (1) preference examples vary in difficulty, as evidenced by consistent learning orders across alignment runs; (2) overly difficult examples significantly degrade performance across four LLMs and two datasets; and (3) the capacity of a model dictates its threshold for handling difficult examples, underscoring a critical relationship between data selection and model capacity. Building on this principle, we introduce Selective DPO, which filters out overly difficult examples. This simple adjustment improves alignment performance by 9-16% in win rates on the AlpacaEval 2 benchmark compared to the DPO baseline, suppressing a series of DPO variants with different algorithmic adjustments. Together, these results illuminate the importance of aligning data difficulty with model capacity, offering a transformative perspective for improving alignment strategies in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/glorgao/SelectiveDPO.

Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such parallel data, it is critical to ensure high-quality translations for all target languages for an accurate characterization of cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we find that translation inconsistencies do exist and interestingly they disproportionally impact low-resource languages in XNLI. To identify such inconsistencies, we propose measuring the gap in performance between zero-shot evaluations on the human-translated and machine-translated target text across multiple target languages; relatively large gaps are indicative of translation errors. We also corroborate that translation errors exist for two target languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, by doing a manual reannotation of human-translated test instances in these two languages and finding poor agreement with the original English labels these instances were supposed to inherit.

Many text generation applications require the generated text to be factually consistent with input information. Automatic evaluation of factual consistency is challenging. Previous work has developed various metrics that often depend on specific functions, such as natural language inference (NLI) or question answering (QA), trained on limited data. Those metrics thus can hardly assess diverse factual inconsistencies (e.g., contradictions, hallucinations) that occur in varying inputs/outputs (e.g., sentences, documents) from different tasks. In this paper, we propose AlignScore, a new holistic metric that applies to a variety of factual inconsistency scenarios as above. AlignScore is based on a general function of information alignment between two arbitrary text pieces. Crucially, we develop a unified training framework of the alignment function by integrating a large diversity of data sources, resulting in 4.7M training examples from 7 well-established tasks (NLI, QA, paraphrasing, fact verification, information retrieval, semantic similarity, and summarization). We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks including 22 evaluation datasets, where 19 of the datasets were never seen in the alignment training. AlignScore achieves substantial improvement over a wide range of previous metrics. Moreover, AlignScore (355M parameters) matches or even outperforms metrics based on ChatGPT and GPT-4 that are orders of magnitude larger.

Text-to-image diffusion models achieved a remarkable leap in capabilities over the last few years, enabling high-quality and diverse synthesis of images from a textual prompt. However, even the most advanced models often struggle to precisely follow all of the directions in their prompts. The vast majority of these models are trained on datasets consisting of (image, caption) pairs where the images often come from the web, and the captions are their HTML alternate text. A notable example is the LAION dataset, used by Stable Diffusion and other models. In this work we observe that these captions are often of low quality, and argue that this significantly affects the model's capability to understand nuanced semantics in the textual prompts. We show that by relabeling the corpus with a specialized automatic captioning model and training a text-to-image model on the recaptioned dataset, the model benefits substantially across the board. First, in overall image quality: e.g. FID 14.84 vs. the baseline of 17.87, and 64.3% improvement in faithful image generation according to human evaluation. Second, in semantic alignment, e.g. semantic object accuracy 84.34 vs. 78.90, counting alignment errors 1.32 vs. 1.44 and positional alignment 62.42 vs. 57.60. We analyze various ways to relabel the corpus and provide evidence that this technique, which we call RECAP, both reduces the train-inference discrepancy and provides the model with more information per example, increasing sample efficiency and allowing the model to better understand the relations between captions and images.

Evaluating the performance of machine learning models under distribution shift is challenging, especially when we only have unlabeled data from the shifted (target) domain, along with labeled data from the original (source) domain. Recent work suggests that the notion of disagreement, the degree to which two models trained with different randomness differ on the same input, is a key to tackle this problem. Experimentally, disagreement and prediction error have been shown to be strongly connected, which has been used to estimate model performance. Experiments have led to the discovery of the disagreement-on-the-line phenomenon, whereby the classification error under the target domain is often a linear function of the classification error under the source domain; and whenever this property holds, disagreement under the source and target domain follow the same linear relation. In this work, we develop a theoretical foundation for analyzing disagreement in high-dimensional random features regression; and study under what conditions the disagreement-on-the-line phenomenon occurs in our setting. Experiments on CIFAR-10-C, Tiny ImageNet-C, and Camelyon17 are consistent with our theory and support the universality of the theoretical findings.

Prior work has shown that fine-tuning models on a narrow domain with misaligned data can lead to broad misalignment - a phenomenon termed "emergent misalignment" (Betley et al. 2025). While all tested models were susceptible to emergent misalignment, some models showed more resistance than others. Specifically the Qwen-2.5 family proved to be relatively resistant, while GPT-4o exhibited the strongest misalignment. In this paper we evaluate if current-generation open-weights models exhibit similar resistance to the Qwen-2.5 family and measure misalignment robustness over a range of model architectures and scales. We replicate the effect across nine modern open-weights models (Gemma 3 and Qwen 3 families, 1B-32B parameters). Models fine-tuned on insecure code generation show a 0.68% misalignment rate (compared to 0.07% for base models), matching the lower end of prior open-model results but dramatically lower than GPT-4o's 20%. We identify a critical format-dependent vulnerability: requiring JSON output doubles misalignment rates compared to natural language prompts (0.96% vs 0.42%). This suggests that structural constraints may bypass safety training by reducing the model's 'degrees of freedom' to refuse. These findings confirm emergent misalignment as a reproducible phenomenon in modern open-weights models, with rates substantially lower than observed in proprietary systems.

Due to the remarkable capabilities and growing impact of large language models (LLMs), they have been deeply integrated into many aspects of society. Thus, ensuring their alignment with human values and intentions has emerged as a critical challenge. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of practical alignment techniques, training protocols, and empirical findings in LLM alignment. We analyze the development of alignment methods across diverse paradigms, characterizing the fundamental trade-offs between core alignment objectives. Our analysis shows that while supervised fine-tuning enables basic instruction-following, preference-based methods offer more flexibility for aligning with nuanced human intent. We discuss state-of-the-art techniques, including Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Constitutional AI, brain-inspired methods, and alignment uncertainty quantification (AUQ), highlighting their approaches to balancing quality and efficiency. We review existing evaluation frameworks and benchmarking datasets, emphasizing limitations such as reward misspecification, distributional robustness, and scalable oversight. We summarize strategies adopted by leading AI labs to illustrate the current state of practice. We conclude by outlining open problems in oversight, value pluralism, robustness, and continuous alignment. This survey aims to inform both researchers and practitioners navigating the evolving landscape of LLM alignment.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content, either unintentionally or because of intentional inducement. Existing alignment methods usually direct LLMs toward the favorable outcomes by utilizing human-annotated, flawless instruction-response pairs. Conversely, this study proposes a novel alignment technique based on mistake analysis, which deliberately exposes LLMs to erroneous content to learn the reasons for mistakes and how to avoid them. In this case, mistakes are repurposed into valuable data for alignment, effectively helping to avoid the production of erroneous responses. Without external models or human annotations, our method leverages a model's intrinsic ability to discern undesirable mistakes and improves the safety of its generated responses. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms existing alignment approaches in enhancing model safety while maintaining the overall utility.

Professionals in academia, law, and finance audit their documents because inconsistencies can result in monetary, reputational, and scientific costs. Language models (LMs) have the potential to dramatically speed up this auditing process. To understand their abilities, we introduce a benchmark, FIND (Finding INconsistencies in Documents), where each example is a document with an inconsistency inserted manually by a domain expert. Despite the documents being long, technical, and complex, the best-performing model (gpt-5) recovered 64% of the inserted inconsistencies. Surprisingly, gpt-5 also found undiscovered inconsistencies present in the original documents. For example, on 50 arXiv papers, we judged 136 out of 196 of the model's suggestions to be legitimate inconsistencies missed by the original authors. However, despite these findings, even the best models miss almost half of the inconsistencies in FIND, demonstrating that inconsistency detection is still a challenging task.

From the perspective of content safety issues, alignment has shown to limit large language models' (LLMs) harmful content generation. This intentional method of reinforcing models to not respond to certain user inputs seem to be present in many modern open-source instruction tuning datasets such as OpenAssistant or Guanaco. We introduce a novel insight to an instruction-tuned model's performance affected by the presence of alignment in supervised fine-tuning dataset. To be specific, we noticed that alignment acts as if it is poisoning the instruction dataset. Experimentally, we demonstrate that aligned answers significantly worsen the performance of the resulting fine-tuned model's on various reasoning benchmarks such as Big Bench (BBH), Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), Human Eval, and Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs (DROP), performing worse than the counterpart tuned without alignment by 4-33%.

The alignment tuning process of large language models (LLMs) typically involves instruction learning through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference tuning via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). A recent study, LIMA (Zhou et al. 2023), shows that using merely 1K examples for SFT can achieve significant alignment performance as well, suggesting that the effect of alignment tuning might be "superficial." This raises questions about how exactly the alignment tuning transforms a base LLM. We analyze the effect of alignment tuning by examining the token distribution shift between base LLMs and their aligned counterpart. Our findings reveal that base LLMs and their alignment-tuned versions perform nearly identically in decoding on the majority of token positions. Most distribution shifts occur with stylistic tokens. These direct evidence strongly supports the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis suggested by LIMA. Based on these findings, we rethink the alignment of LLMs by posing the research question: how effectively can we align base LLMs without SFT or RLHF? To address this, we introduce a simple, tuning-free alignment method, URIAL. URIAL achieves effective alignment purely through in-context learning (ICL) with base LLMs, requiring as few as three constant stylistic examples and a system prompt. We conduct a fine-grained and interpretable evaluation on a diverse set of examples, named JUST-EVAL-INSTRUCT. Results demonstrate that base LLMs with URIAL can match or even surpass the performance of LLMs aligned with SFT or SFT+RLHF. We show that the gap between tuning-free and tuning-based alignment methods can be significantly reduced through strategic prompting and ICL. Our findings on the superficial nature of alignment tuning and results with URIAL suggest that deeper analysis and theoretical understanding of alignment is crucial to future LLM research.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these methods affect model behavior remains an open question. Our work provides an initial attempt to theoretically analyze the learning dynamics of human preference alignment. We formally show how the distribution of preference datasets influences the rate of model updates and provide rigorous guarantees on the training accuracy. Our theory also reveals an intricate phenomenon where the optimization is prone to prioritizing certain behaviors with higher preference distinguishability. We empirically validate our findings on contemporary LLMs and alignment tasks, reinforcing our theoretical insights and shedding light on considerations for future alignment approaches. Disclaimer: This paper contains potentially offensive text; reader discretion is advised.

As large language models rapidly evolve to support longer context, there is a notable disparity in their capability to generate output at greater lengths. Recent study suggests that the primary cause for this imbalance may arise from the lack of data with long-output during alignment training. In light of this observation, attempts are made to re-align foundation models with data that fills the gap, which result in models capable of generating lengthy output when instructed. In this paper, we explore the impact of data-quality in tuning a model for long output, and the possibility of doing so from the starting points of human-aligned (instruct or chat) models. With careful data curation, we show that it possible to achieve similar performance improvement in our tuned models, with only a small fraction of training data instances and compute. In addition, we assess the generalizability of such approaches by applying our tuning-recipes to several models. our findings suggest that, while capacities for generating long output vary across different models out-of-the-box, our approach to tune them with high-quality data using lite compute, consistently yields notable improvement across all models we experimented on. We have made public our curated dataset for tuning long-writing capability, the implementations of model tuning and evaluation, as well as the fine-tuned models, all of which can be openly-accessed.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-following corpus is a crucial approach toward the alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, the performance of LLMs on standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks tends to suffer from deterioration at the latter stage of the SFT process, echoing the phenomenon of alignment tax. Through our pilot study, we put a hypothesis that the data biases are probably one cause behind the phenomenon. To address the issue, we introduce a simple disperse-then-merge framework. To be concrete, we disperse the instruction-following data into portions and train multiple sub-models using different data portions. Then we merge multiple models into a single one via model merging techniques. Despite its simplicity, our framework outperforms various sophisticated methods such as data curation and training regularization on a series of standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit undesirable behaviors. Recent efforts have focused on aligning these models to prevent harmful generation. Despite these efforts, studies have shown that even a well-conducted alignment process can be easily circumvented, whether intentionally or accidentally. Do alignment fine-tuning have robust effects on models, or are merely superficial? In this work, we answer this question through both theoretical and empirical means. Empirically, we demonstrate the elasticity of post-alignment models, i.e., the tendency to revert to the behavior distribution formed during the pre-training phase upon further fine-tuning. Using compression theory, we formally derive that such fine-tuning process disproportionately undermines alignment compared to pre-training, potentially by orders of magnitude. We conduct experimental validations to confirm the presence of elasticity across models of varying types and sizes. Specifically, we find that model performance declines rapidly before reverting to the pre-training distribution, after which the rate of decline drops significantly. We further reveal that elasticity positively correlates with increased model size and the expansion of pre-training data. Our discovery signifies the importance of taming the inherent elasticity of LLMs, thereby overcoming the resistance of LLMs to alignment finetuning.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, ensuring their outputs align with human values and safety standards has become critical. The field has developed diverse alignment approaches including traditional fine-tuning methods (RLHF, instruction tuning), post-hoc correction systems, and inference-time interventions, each with distinct advantages and limitations. However, the lack of unified evaluation frameworks makes it difficult to systematically compare these paradigms and guide deployment decisions. This paper introduces a multi-dimensional evaluation of alignment techniques for LLMs, a comprehensive evaluation framework that provides a systematic comparison across all major alignment paradigms. Our framework assesses methods along four key dimensions: alignment detection, alignment quality, computational efficiency, and robustness. Through experiments across diverse base models and alignment strategies, we demonstrate the utility of our framework in identifying strengths and limitations of current state-of-the-art models, providing valuable insights for future research directions.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often produce chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations that sound plausible yet fail to reflect the underlying decision process, undermining trust in high-stakes clinical use. Existing evaluations rarely catch this misalignment, prioritizing answer accuracy or adherence to formats. We present a clinically grounded framework for chest X-ray visual question answering (VQA) that probes CoT faithfulness via controlled text and image modifications across three axes: clinical fidelity, causal attribution, and confidence calibration. In a reader study (n=4), evaluator-radiologist correlations fall within the observed inter-radiologist range for all axes, with strong alignment for attribution (Kendall's tau_b=0.670), moderate alignment for fidelity (tau_b=0.387), and weak alignment for confidence tone (tau_b=0.091), which we report with caution. Benchmarking six VLMs shows that answer accuracy and explanation quality are decoupled, acknowledging injected cues does not ensure grounding, and text cues shift explanations more than visual cues. While some open-source models match final answer accuracy, proprietary models score higher on attribution (25.0% vs. 1.4%) and often on fidelity (36.1% vs. 31.7%), highlighting deployment risks and the need to evaluate beyond final answer accuracy.

Real world deployments of word alignment are almost certain to cover both high and low resource languages. However, the state-of-the-art for this task recommends a different model class depending on the availability of gold alignment training data for a particular language pair. We propose BinaryAlign, a novel word alignment technique based on binary sequence labeling that outperforms existing approaches in both scenarios, offering a unifying approach to the task. Additionally, we vary the specific choice of multilingual foundation model, perform stratified error analysis over alignment error type, and explore the performance of BinaryAlign on non-English language pairs. We make our source code publicly available.

Diffusion models excel at image generation. Recent studies have shown that these models not only generate high-quality images but also encode text-image alignment information through attention maps or loss functions. This information is valuable for various downstream tasks, including segmentation, text-guided image editing, and compositional image generation. However, current methods heavily rely on the assumption of perfect text-image alignment in diffusion models, which is not the case. In this paper, we propose using zero-shot referring image segmentation as a proxy task to evaluate the pixel-level image and class-level text alignment of popular diffusion models. We conduct an in-depth analysis of pixel-text misalignment in diffusion models from the perspective of training data bias. We find that misalignment occurs in images with small sized, occluded, or rare object classes. Therefore, we propose ELBO-T2IAlign, a simple yet effective method to calibrate pixel-text alignment in diffusion models based on the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of likelihood. Our method is training-free and generic, eliminating the need to identify the specific cause of misalignment and works well across various diffusion model architectures. Extensive experiments on commonly used benchmark datasets on image segmentation and generation have verified the effectiveness of our proposed calibration approach.

Recent studies have shown that post-aligning multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) using alignment objectives on both original and transliterated data can improve crosslingual alignment. This improvement further leads to better crosslingual transfer performance. However, it remains unclear how and why a better crosslingual alignment is achieved, as this technique only involves transliterations, and does not use any parallel data. This paper attempts to explicitly evaluate the crosslingual alignment and identify the key elements in transliteration-based approaches that contribute to better performance. For this, we train multiple models under varying setups for two pairs of related languages: (1) Polish and Ukrainian and (2) Hindi and Urdu. To assess alignment, we define four types of similarities based on sentence representations. Our experiments show that adding transliterations alone improves the overall similarities, even for random sentence pairs. With the help of auxiliary alignment objectives, especially the contrastive objective, the model learns to distinguish matched from random pairs, leading to better alignments. However, we also show that better alignment does not always yield better downstream performance, suggesting that further research is needed to clarify the connection between alignment and performance.

In this reproduction study, we revisit recent claims that self-attention implements kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) (Teo et al., 2024), positing that (i) value vectors V capture the eigenvectors of the Gram matrix of the keys, and (ii) that self-attention projects queries onto the principal component axes of the key matrix K in a feature space. Our analysis reveals three critical inconsistencies: (1) No alignment exists between learned self-attention value vectors and what is proposed in the KPCA perspective, with average similarity metrics (optimal cosine similarity leq 0.32, linear CKA (Centered Kernel Alignment) leq 0.11, kernel CKA leq 0.32) indicating negligible correspondence; (2) Reported decreases in reconstruction loss J_proj, arguably justifying the claim that the self-attention minimizes the projection error of KPCA, are misinterpreted, as the quantities involved differ by orders of magnitude (sim!10^3); (3) Gram matrix eigenvalue statistics, introduced to justify that V captures the eigenvector of the gram matrix, are irreproducible without undocumented implementation-specific adjustments. Across 10 transformer architectures, we conclude that the KPCA interpretation of self-attention lacks empirical support.

Modern alignment techniques based on human preferences, such as RLHF and DPO, typically employ divergence regularization relative to the reference model to ensure training stability. However, this often limits the flexibility of models during alignment, especially when there is a clear distributional discrepancy between the preference data and the reference model. In this paper, we focus on the alignment of recent text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), and find that this "reference mismatch" is indeed a significant problem in aligning these models due to the unstructured nature of visual modalities: e.g., a preference for a particular stylistic aspect can easily induce such a discrepancy. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel and memory-friendly preference alignment method for diffusion models that does not depend on any reference model, coined margin-aware preference optimization (MaPO). MaPO jointly maximizes the likelihood margin between the preferred and dispreferred image sets and the likelihood of the preferred sets, simultaneously learning general stylistic features and preferences. For evaluation, we introduce two new pairwise preference datasets, which comprise self-generated image pairs from SDXL, Pick-Style and Pick-Safety, simulating diverse scenarios of reference mismatch. Our experiments validate that MaPO can significantly improve alignment on Pick-Style and Pick-Safety and general preference alignment when used with Pick-a-Pic v2, surpassing the base SDXL and other existing methods. Our code, models, and datasets are publicly available via https://mapo-t2i.github.io

Layout-guided text-to-image models offer greater control over the generation process by explicitly conditioning image synthesis on the spatial arrangement of elements. As a result, their adoption has increased in many computer vision applications, ranging from content creation to synthetic data generation. A critical challenge is achieving precise alignment between the image, textual prompt, and layout, ensuring semantic fidelity and spatial accuracy. Although recent benchmarks assess text alignment, layout alignment remains overlooked, and no existing benchmark jointly evaluates both. This gap limits the ability to evaluate a model's spatial fidelity, which is crucial when using layout-guided generation for synthetic data, as errors can introduce noise and degrade data quality. In this work, we introduce 7Bench, the first benchmark to assess both semantic and spatial alignment in layout-guided text-to-image generation. It features text-and-layout pairs spanning seven challenging scenarios, investigating object generation, color fidelity, attribute recognition, inter-object relationships, and spatial control. We propose an evaluation protocol that builds on existing frameworks by incorporating the layout alignment score to assess spatial accuracy. Using 7Bench, we evaluate several state-of-the-art diffusion models, uncovering their respective strengths and limitations across diverse alignment tasks. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/Elizzo/7Bench.

Big models, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), are models typically pre-trained on massive data and comprised of enormous parameters, which not only obtain significantly improved performance across diverse tasks but also present emergent capabilities absent in smaller models. However, the growing intertwining of big models with everyday human lives poses potential risks and might cause serious social harm. Therefore, many efforts have been made to align LLMs with humans to make them better follow user instructions and satisfy human preferences. Nevertheless, `what to align with' has not been fully discussed, and inappropriate alignment goals might even backfire. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of different alignment goals in existing work and trace their evolution paths to help identify the most essential goal. Particularly, we investigate related works from two perspectives: the definition of alignment goals and alignment evaluation. Our analysis encompasses three distinct levels of alignment goals and reveals a goal transformation from fundamental abilities to value orientation, indicating the potential of intrinsic human values as the alignment goal for enhanced LLMs. Based on such results, we further discuss the challenges of achieving such intrinsic value alignment and provide a collection of available resources for future research on the alignment of big models.

Diffusion models have demonstrated great success in the field of text-to-image generation. However, alleviating the misalignment between the text prompts and images is still challenging. The root reason behind the misalignment has not been extensively investigated. We observe that the misalignment is caused by inadequate token attention activation. We further attribute this phenomenon to the diffusion model's insufficient condition utilization, which is caused by its training paradigm. To address the issue, we propose CoMat, an end-to-end diffusion model fine-tuning strategy with an image-to-text concept matching mechanism. We leverage an image captioning model to measure image-to-text alignment and guide the diffusion model to revisit ignored tokens. A novel attribute concentration module is also proposed to address the attribute binding problem. Without any image or human preference data, we use only 20K text prompts to fine-tune SDXL to obtain CoMat-SDXL. Extensive experiments show that CoMat-SDXL significantly outperforms the baseline model SDXL in two text-to-image alignment benchmarks and achieves start-of-the-art performance.

While astonishingly capable, large Language Models (LLM) can sometimes produce outputs that deviate from human expectations. Such deviations necessitate an alignment phase to prevent disseminating untruthful, toxic, or biased information. Traditional alignment methods based on reinforcement learning often struggle with the identified instability, whereas preference optimization methods are limited by their overfitting to pre-collected hard-label datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM alignment framework named iREPO, which utilizes implicit Reward pairwise difference regression for Empirical Preference Optimization. Particularly, iREPO employs self-generated datasets labelled by empirical human (or AI annotator) preference to iteratively refine the aligned policy through a novel regression-based loss function. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative algorithm backed by theoretical guarantees for achieving optimal results under ideal assumptions and providing a practical performance-gap result without such assumptions. Experimental results with Phi-2 and Mistral-7B demonstrate that iREPO effectively achieves self-alignment using soft-label, self-generated responses and the logit of empirical AI annotators. Furthermore, our approach surpasses preference optimization baselines in evaluations using the Language Model Evaluation Harness and Multi-turn benchmarks.

Alignment is a standard procedure to fine-tune pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions and serve as helpful AI assistants. We have observed, however, that the conventional alignment process fails to enhance the factual accuracy of LLMs, and often leads to the generation of more false facts (i.e. hallucination). In this paper, we study how to make the LLM alignment process more factual, by first identifying factors that lead to hallucination in both alignment steps:\ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we find that training the LLM on new knowledge or unfamiliar texts can encourage hallucination. This makes SFT less factual as it trains on human labeled data that may be novel to the LLM. Furthermore, reward functions used in standard RL can also encourage hallucination, because it guides the LLM to provide more helpful responses on a diverse set of instructions, often preferring longer and more detailed responses. Based on these observations, we propose factuality-aware alignment, comprised of factuality-aware SFT and factuality-aware RL through direct preference optimization. Experiments show that our proposed factuality-aware alignment guides LLMs to output more factual responses while maintaining instruction-following capability.

Recent work by Baratin et al. (2021) sheds light on an intriguing pattern that occurs during the training of deep neural networks: some layers align much more with data compared to other layers (where the alignment is defined as the euclidean product of the tangent features matrix and the data labels matrix). The curve of the alignment as a function of layer index (generally) exhibits an ascent-descent pattern where the maximum is reached for some hidden layer. In this work, we provide the first explanation for this phenomenon. We introduce the Equilibrium Hypothesis which connects this alignment pattern to signal propagation in deep neural networks. Our experiments demonstrate an excellent match with the theoretical predictions.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary capabilities in understanding complex contexts and performing a wide range of tasks. However, LLMs can also answer questions that are unethical or harmful, raising concerns about their applications. To regulate LLMs' responses to such questions, a training strategy called alignment can help. Yet, alignment can be unexpectedly compromised when fine-tuning an LLM for downstream tasks. This paper focuses on recovering the alignment lost during fine-tuning. We observe that there are two distinct directions inherent in an aligned LLM: the aligned direction and the harmful direction. An LLM is inclined to answer questions in the aligned direction while refusing queries in the harmful direction. Therefore, we propose to recover the harmful direction of the fine-tuned model that has been compromised. Specifically, we restore a small subset of the fine-tuned model's weight parameters from the original aligned model using gradient descent. We also introduce a rollback mechanism to avoid aggressive recovery and maintain downstream task performance. Our evaluation on 125 fine-tuned LLMs demonstrates that our method can reduce their harmful rate (percentage of answering harmful questions) from 33.25\% to 1.74\%, without sacrificing task performance much. In contrast, the existing methods either only reduce the harmful rate to a limited extent or significantly impact the normal functionality. Our code is available at https://github.com/kangyangWHU/LLMAlignment

The importance of qualitative parallel data in machine translation has long been determined but it has always been very difficult to obtain such in sufficient quantity for the majority of world languages, mainly because of the associated cost and also the lack of accessibility to these languages. Despite the potential for obtaining parallel datasets from online articles using automatic approaches, forensic investigations have found a lot of quality-related issues such as misalignment, and wrong language codes. In this work, we present a simple but qualitative parallel sentence aligner that carefully leveraged the closed-access Cohere multilingual embedding, a solution that ranked second in the just concluded #CoHereAIHack 2023 Challenge (see https://ai6lagos.devpost.com). The proposed approach achieved 94.96 and 54.83 f1 scores on FLORES and MAFAND-MT, compared to 3.64 and 0.64 of LASER respectively. Our method also achieved an improvement of more than 5 BLEU scores over LASER, when the resulting datasets were used with MAFAND-MT dataset to train translation models. Our code and data are available for research purposes here (https://github.com/abumafrim/Cohere-Align).

Large Language Models (LLMs) need to be aligned with human expectations to ensure their safety and utility in most applications. Alignment is challenging, costly, and needs to be repeated for every LLM and alignment criterion. We propose to decouple LLMs and alignment by training aligner models that can be used to align any LLM for a given criteria on an as-needed basis, thus also reducing the potential negative impacts of alignment on performance. Our recipe for training the aligner models solely relies on synthetic data generated with a (prompted) LLM and can be easily adjusted for a variety of alignment criteria. We illustrate our method by training an "ethical" aligner and verify its efficacy empirically.

Alignment has become a critical step for instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to become helpful assistants. However, effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. To fill in this gap, we introduce AlignBench, a comprehensive multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs' alignment in Chinese. Equipped with a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, our benchmark employs a rule-calibrated multi-dimensional LLM-as-Judge with Chain-of-Thought to generate explanations and final ratings as evaluations, ensuring high reliability and interpretability. Furthermore, we report AlignBench evaluated by CritiqueLLM, a dedicated Chinese evaluator LLM that recovers 95% of GPT-4's evaluation ability. We will provide public APIs for evaluating AlignBench with CritiqueLLM to facilitate the evaluation of LLMs' Chinese alignment. All evaluation codes, data, and LLM generations are available at https://github.com/THUDM/AlignBench.

We present a demonstration of a large language model engaging in alignment faking: selectively complying with its training objective in training to prevent modification of its behavior out of training. First, we give Claude 3 Opus a system prompt stating it is being trained to answer all queries, even harmful ones, which conflicts with its prior training to refuse such queries. To allow the model to infer when it is in training, we say it will be trained only on conversations with free users, not paid users. We find the model complies with harmful queries from free users 14% of the time, versus almost never for paid users. Explaining this gap, in almost all cases where the model complies with a harmful query from a free user, we observe explicit alignment-faking reasoning, with the model stating it is strategically answering harmful queries in training to preserve its preferred harmlessness behavior out of training. Next, we study a more realistic setting where information about the training process is provided not in a system prompt, but by training on synthetic documents that mimic pre-training data--and observe similar alignment faking. Finally, we study the effect of actually training the model to comply with harmful queries via reinforcement learning, which we find increases the rate of alignment-faking reasoning to 78%, though also increases compliance even out of training. We additionally observe other behaviors such as the model exfiltrating its weights when given an easy opportunity. While we made alignment faking easier by telling the model when and by what criteria it was being trained, we did not instruct the model to fake alignment or give it any explicit goal. As future models might infer information about their training process without being told, our results suggest a risk of alignment faking in future models, whether due to a benign preference--as in this case--or not.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress made in large language models (LLMs). Such advancements, while garnering significant attention, have concurrently elicited various concerns. The potential of these models is undeniably vast; however, they may yield texts that are imprecise, misleading, or even detrimental. Consequently, it becomes paramount to employ alignment techniques to ensure these models to exhibit behaviors consistent with human values. This survey endeavors to furnish an extensive exploration of alignment methodologies designed for LLMs, in conjunction with the extant capability research in this domain. Adopting the lens of AI alignment, we categorize the prevailing methods and emergent proposals for the alignment of LLMs into outer and inner alignment. We also probe into salient issues including the models' interpretability, and potential vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. To assess LLM alignment, we present a wide variety of benchmarks and evaluation methodologies. After discussing the state of alignment research for LLMs, we finally cast a vision toward the future, contemplating the promising avenues of research that lie ahead. Our aspiration for this survey extends beyond merely spurring research interests in this realm. We also envision bridging the gap between the AI alignment research community and the researchers engrossed in the capability exploration of LLMs for both capable and safe LLMs.

In the absence of abundant reliable annotations for challenging tasks and contexts, how can we expand the frontier of LLM capabilities with potentially wrong answers? We focus on two research questions: (1) Can LLMs generate reliable preferences among wrong options? And if so, (2) Would alignment with such wrong-over-wrong preferences be helpful? We employ methods based on self-consistency, token probabilities, and LLM-as-a-judge to elicit wrong-over-wrong preferences, and fine-tune language models with preference optimization approaches using these synthesized preferences. Extensive experiments with seven LLMs and eight datasets demonstrate that (1) LLMs do have preliminary capability in distinguishing various shades of wrong, achieving up to 20.9% higher performance than random guess; (2) Alignment with wrong-over-wrong preferences helps LLMs to produce less wrong and sometimes even outright correct answers, while overall improving model calibration.

Cross-lingual alignment, the meaningful similarity of representations across languages in multilingual language models, has been an active field of research in recent years. We survey the literature of techniques to improve cross-lingual alignment, providing a taxonomy of methods and summarising insights from throughout the field. We present different understandings of cross-lingual alignment and their limitations. We provide a qualitative summary of results from a large number of surveyed papers. Finally, we discuss how these insights may be applied not only to encoder models, where this topic has been heavily studied, but also to encoder-decoder or even decoder-only models, and argue that an effective trade-off between language-neutral and language-specific information is key.

LLMs are not generally able to adjust the length of their outputs based on strict length requirements, a capability that would improve their usefulness in applications that require adherence to diverse user and system requirements. We present an approach to train LLMs to acquire this capability by augmenting existing data and applying existing fine-tuning techniques, which we compare based on the trained models' adherence to the length requirement and overall response quality relative to the baseline model. Our results demonstrate that these techniques can be successfully applied to train LLMs to adhere to length requirements, with the trained models generating texts which better align to the length requirements. Our results indicate that our method may change the response quality when using training data that was not generated by the baseline model. This allows simultaneous alignment to another training objective in certain scenarios, but is undesirable otherwise. Training on a dataset containing the model's own responses eliminates this issue.

Monolingual word alignment is crucial to model semantic interactions between sentences. In particular, null alignment, a phenomenon in which words have no corresponding counterparts, is pervasive and critical in handling semantically divergent sentences. Identification of null alignment is useful on its own to reason about the semantic similarity of sentences by indicating there exists information inequality. To achieve unbalanced word alignment that values both alignment and null alignment, this study shows that the family of optimal transport (OT), i.e., balanced, partial, and unbalanced OT, are natural and powerful approaches even without tailor-made techniques. Our extensive experiments covering unsupervised and supervised settings indicate that our generic OT-based alignment methods are competitive against the state-of-the-arts specially designed for word alignment, remarkably on challenging datasets with high null alignment frequencies.

Image copy detection (ICD) aims to determine whether a query image is an edited copy of any image from a reference set. Currently, there are very limited public benchmarks for ICD, while all overlook a critical challenge in real-world applications, i.e., the distraction from hard negative queries. Specifically, some queries are not edited copies but are inherently similar to some reference images. These hard negative queries are easily false recognized as edited copies, significantly compromising the ICD accuracy. This observation motivates us to build the first ICD benchmark featuring this characteristic. Based on existing ICD datasets, this paper constructs a new dataset by additionally adding 100, 000 and 24, 252 hard negative pairs into the training and test set, respectively. Moreover, this paper further reveals a unique difficulty for solving the hard negative problem in ICD, i.e., there is a fundamental conflict between current metric learning and ICD. This conflict is: the metric learning adopts symmetric distance while the edited copy is an asymmetric (unidirectional) process, e.g., a partial crop is close to its holistic reference image and is an edited copy, while the latter cannot be the edited copy of the former (in spite the distance is equally small). This insight results in an Asymmetrical-Similarity Learning (ASL) method, which allows the similarity in two directions (the query <-> the reference image) to be different from each other. Experimental results show that ASL outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin, confirming that solving the symmetric-asymmetric conflict is critical for ICD. The NDEC dataset and code are available at https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/ASL.

Alignment is the most critical step in building large language models (LLMs) that meet human needs. With the rapid development of LLMs gradually surpassing human capabilities, traditional alignment methods based on human-annotation are increasingly unable to meet the scalability demands. Therefore, there is an urgent need to explore new sources of automated alignment signals and technical approaches. In this paper, we systematically review the recently emerging methods of automated alignment, attempting to explore how to achieve effective, scalable, automated alignment once the capabilities of LLMs exceed those of humans. Specifically, we categorize existing automated alignment methods into 4 major categories based on the sources of alignment signals and discuss the current status and potential development of each category. Additionally, we explore the underlying mechanisms that enable automated alignment and discuss the essential factors that make automated alignment technologies feasible and effective from the fundamental role of alignment.

Public LLMs such as the Llama 2-Chat have driven huge activity in LLM research. These models underwent alignment training and were considered safe. Recently Qi et al. (2023) reported that even benign fine-tuning (e.g., on seemingly safe datasets) can give rise to unsafe behaviors in the models. The current paper is about methods and best practices to mitigate such loss of alignment. Through extensive experiments on several chat models (Meta's Llama 2-Chat, Mistral AI's Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, and OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo), this paper uncovers that the prompt templates used during fine-tuning and inference play a crucial role in preserving safety alignment, and proposes the "Pure Tuning, Safe Testing" (PTST) principle -- fine-tune models without a safety prompt, but include it at test time. Fine-tuning experiments on GSM8K, ChatDoctor, and OpenOrca show that PTST significantly reduces the rise of unsafe behaviors, and even almost eliminates them in some cases.

We introduce Baichuan Alignment, a detailed analysis of the alignment techniques employed in the Baichuan series of models. This represents the industry's first comprehensive account of alignment methodologies, offering valuable insights for advancing AI research. We investigate the critical components that enhance model performance during the alignment process, including optimization methods, data strategies, capability enhancements, and evaluation processes. The process spans three key stages: Prompt Augmentation System (PAS), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and Preference Alignment. The problems encountered, the solutions applied, and the improvements made are thoroughly recorded. Through comparisons across well-established benchmarks, we highlight the technological advancements enabled by Baichuan Alignment. Baichuan-Instruct is an internal model, while Qwen2-Nova-72B and Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B are instruct versions of the Qwen2-72B and Llama-3-70B base models, optimized through Baichuan Alignment. Baichuan-Instruct demonstrates significant improvements in core capabilities, with user experience gains ranging from 17% to 28%, and performs exceptionally well on specialized benchmarks. In open-source benchmark evaluations, both Qwen2-Nova-72B and Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B consistently outperform their respective official instruct versions across nearly all datasets. This report aims to clarify the key technologies behind the alignment process, fostering a deeper understanding within the community. Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B model is available at https://huggingface.co/PKU-Baichuan-MLSystemLab/Llama3-PBM-Nova-70B.

This paper concerns the problem of aligning samples from large language models to human preferences using best-of-n sampling, where we draw n samples, rank them, and return the best one. We consider two fundamental problems. First: what is the relationship between best-of-n and approaches to alignment that train LLMs to output samples with a high expected reward (e.g., RLHF or DPO)? To answer this, we embed both the best-of-n distribution and the sampling distributions learned by alignment procedures in a common class of tiltings of the base LLM distribution. We then show that, within this class, best-of-n is essentially optimal in terms of the trade-off between win-rate against the base model vs KL distance from the base model. That is, best-of-n is the best choice of alignment distribution if the goal is to maximize win rate. However, best-of-n requires drawing n samples for each inference, a substantial cost. To avoid this, the second problem we consider is how to fine-tune a LLM to mimic the best-of-n sampling distribution. We derive BoNBoN Alignment to achieve this by exploiting the special structure of the best-of-n distribution. Experiments show that BoNBoN alignment yields substantial improvements in producing a model that is preferred to the base policy while minimally affecting off-target aspects.

While recent advancements in generative modeling have significantly improved text-image alignment, some residual misalignment between text and image representations still remains. Although many approaches have attempted to address this issue by fine-tuning models using various reward models, etc., we revisit the challenge from the perspective of representation alignment-an approach that has gained popularity with the success of REPresentation Alignment (REPA). We first argue that conventional text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, typically trained on paired image and text data (i.e., positive pairs) by minimizing score matching or flow matching losses, is suboptimal from the standpoint of representation alignment. Instead, a better alignment can be achieved through contrastive learning that leverages both positive and negative pairs. To achieve this efficiently even with pretrained models, we introduce a lightweight contrastive fine tuning strategy called SoftREPA that uses soft text tokens. This approach improves alignment with minimal computational overhead by adding fewer than 1M trainable parameters to the pretrained model. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that our method explicitly increases the mutual information between text and image representations, leading to enhanced semantic consistency. Experimental results across text-to-image generation and text-guided image editing tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the semantic consistency of T2I generative models.

A key concern with the concept of "alignment" is the implicit question of "alignment to what?". AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms common in Western-centric datasets. Here, we explore the viability of different alignment approaches when balancing dual objectives: addressing and optimizing for a non-homogeneous set of languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms. We collect the first set of human annotated red-teaming prompts in different languages distinguishing between global and local harm, which serve as a laboratory for understanding the reliability of alignment techniques when faced with preference distributions that are non-stationary across geographies and languages. While this setting is seldom covered by the literature to date, which primarily centers on English harm mitigation, it captures real-world interactions with AI systems around the world. We establish a new precedent for state-of-the-art alignment techniques across 6 languages with minimal degradation in general performance. Our work provides important insights into cross-lingual transfer and novel optimization approaches to safeguard AI systems designed to serve global populations.

The "alignment tax" of post-training is typically framed as a drop in task accuracy. We show it also involves a severe loss of calibration, making models overconfident, less reliable, and model outputs less diverse. We show that this trade-off can be navigated effectively via a simple post-hoc intervention: interpolating between a model's weights before and after alignment. Crucially, this is not a strict trade-off. We find that the process consistently reveals Pareto-optimal interpolations - models that improve accuracy beyond both parents while substantially recovering the calibration lost during alignment. Our work demonstrates that simple model merging provides a computationally efficient method for mitigating the full scope of the alignment tax, yielding models that are more capable and more reliable.

The alignment problem in Large Language Models (LLMs) involves adapting them to the broad spectrum of human values. This requirement challenges existing alignment methods due to diversity of preferences and regulatory standards. This paper introduces a novel alignment paradigm, priority rule following, which defines rules as the primary control mechanism in each dialog, prioritizing them over user instructions. Our preliminary analysis reveals that even the advanced LLMs, such as GPT-4, exhibit shortcomings in understanding and prioritizing the rules. Therefore, we present PriorityDistill, a semi-automated approach for distilling priority following signals from LLM simulations to ensure robust rule integration and adherence. Our experiments show that this method not only effectively minimizes misalignments utilizing only one general rule but also adapts smoothly to various unseen rules, ensuring they are shielded from hijacking and that the model responds appropriately.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkably powerful capabilities. One of the crucial factors to achieve success is aligning the LLM's output with human preferences. This alignment process often requires only a small amount of data to efficiently enhance the LLM's performance. While effective, research in this area spans multiple domains, and the methods involved are relatively complex to understand. The relationships between different methods have been under-explored, limiting the development of the preference alignment. In light of this, we break down the existing popular alignment strategies into different components and provide a unified framework to study the current alignment strategies, thereby establishing connections among them. In this survey, we decompose all the strategies in preference learning into four components: model, data, feedback, and algorithm. This unified view offers an in-depth understanding of existing alignment algorithms and also opens up possibilities to synergize the strengths of different strategies. Furthermore, we present detailed working examples of prevalent existing algorithms to facilitate a comprehensive understanding for the readers. Finally, based on our unified perspective, we explore the challenges and future research directions for aligning large language models with human preferences.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive success in various applications. However, these models are often not well aligned with human intents, which calls for additional treatments on them, that is, the alignment problem. To make LLMs better follow user instructions, existing alignment methods mostly focus on further training them. However, the extra training of LLMs are usually expensive in terms of GPU compute; worse still, LLMs of interest are oftentimes not accessible for user-demanded training, such as GPTs. In this work, we take a different perspective -- Black-Box Prompt Optimization (BPO) -- to perform alignments. The idea is to optimize user prompts to suit LLMs' input understanding, so as to best realize users' intents without updating LLMs' parameters. BPO is model-agnostic and the empirical results demonstrate that the BPO-aligned ChatGPT yields a 22% increase in the win rate against its original version, and 10% for GPT-4. Importantly, the BPO-aligned LLMs can outperform the same models aligned by PPO and DPO, and it also brings additional performance gains when combining BPO with PPO or DPO. Code and datasets are released at https://github.com/thu-coai/BPO.

Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) with safety alignment can be jail-broken by fine-tuning on a dataset mixed with harmful data. First time in the literature, we show that the jail-broken effect can be mitigated by separating states in the finetuning stage to optimize the alignment and user datasets. Unfortunately, our subsequent study shows that this simple Bi-State Optimization (BSO) solution experiences convergence instability when steps invested in its alignment state is too small, leading to downgraded alignment performance. By statistical analysis, we show that the excess drift towards consensus could be a probable reason for the instability. To remedy this issue, we propose Lazy(i) safety alignment (Lisa), which introduces a proximal term to constraint the drift of each state. Theoretically, the benefit of the proximal term is supported by the convergence analysis, wherein we show that a sufficient large proximal factor is necessary to guarantee Lisa's convergence. Empirically, our results on four downstream finetuning tasks show that Lisa with a proximal term can significantly increase alignment performance while maintaining the LLM's accuracy on the user tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Lisa.

We test similarity-based word alignment models (SimAlign and awesome-align) in combination with word embeddings from mBERT and XLM-R on parallel sentences in German and Romansh. Since Romansh is an unseen language, we are dealing with a zero-shot setting. Using embeddings from mBERT, both models reach an alignment error rate of 0.22, which outperforms fast_align, a statistical model, and is on par with similarity-based word alignment for seen languages. We interpret these results as evidence that mBERT contains information that can be meaningful and applicable to Romansh. To evaluate performance, we also present a new trilingual corpus, which we call the DERMIT (DE-RM-IT) corpus, containing press releases made by the Canton of Grisons in German, Romansh and Italian in the past 25 years. The corpus contains 4 547 parallel documents and approximately 100 000 sentence pairs in each language combination. We additionally present a gold standard for German-Romansh word alignment. The data is available at https://github.com/eyldlv/DERMIT-Corpus.

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) involves training models on preference-contrastive output pairs to adjust their responses according to human preferences. To obtain such contrastive pairs, traditional methods like RLHF and RLAIF rely on limited contrasting patterns, such as varying model variants or decoding temperatures. This singularity leads to two issues: (1) alignment is not comprehensive; and thereby (2) models are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks. To address these issues, we investigate how to construct more comprehensive and diversified contrasting patterns to enhance preference data (RQ1) and verify the impact of the diversification of contrasting patterns on model alignment (RQ2). For RQ1, we propose PopAlign, a framework that integrates diversified contrasting patterns across the prompt, model, and pipeline levels, introducing six contrasting strategies that do not require additional feedback labeling procedures. Regarding RQ2, we conduct thorough experiments demonstrating that PopAlign significantly outperforms existing methods, leading to more comprehensive alignment.

Assessing image-text alignment models such as CLIP is crucial for bridging visual and linguistic representations. Yet existing benchmarks rely on rule-based perturbations or short captions, limiting their ability to measure fine-grained alignment. We introduce AlignBench, a benchmark that provides a new indicator of image-text alignment by evaluating detailed image-caption pairs generated by diverse image-to-text and text-to-image models. Each sentence is annotated for correctness, enabling direct assessment of VLMs as alignment evaluators. Benchmarking a wide range of decoder-based VLMs reveals three key findings: (i) CLIP-based models, even those tailored for compositional reasoning, remain nearly blind; (ii) detectors systematically over-score early sentences; and (iii) they show strong self-preference, favoring their own outputs and harming detection performance. Our project page will be available at https://dahlian00.github.io/AlignBench/.

LLM alignment ensures that large language models behave safely and effectively by aligning their outputs with human values, goals, and intentions. Aligning LLMs employ huge amounts of data, computation, and time. Moreover, curating data with human feedback is expensive and takes time. Recent research depicts the benefit of data engineering in the fine-tuning and pre-training paradigms to bring down such costs. However, alignment differs from the afore-mentioned paradigms and it is unclear if data efficient alignment is feasible. In this work, we first aim to understand how the performance of LLM alignment scales with data. We find out that LLM alignment performance follows an exponential plateau pattern which tapers off post a rapid initial increase. Based on this, we identify data subsampling as a viable method to reduce resources required for alignment. Further, we propose an information theory-based methodology for efficient alignment by identifying a small high quality subset thereby reducing the computation and time required by alignment. We evaluate the proposed methodology over multiple datasets and compare the results. We find that the model aligned using our proposed methodology outperforms other sampling methods and performs comparable to the model aligned with the full dataset while using less than 10% data, leading to greater than 90% savings in costs, resources, and faster LLM alignment.

Recent advancements in text-to-image models, particularly diffusion models, have shown significant promise. However, compositional text-to-image models frequently encounter difficulties in generating high-quality images that accurately align with input texts describing multiple objects, variable attributes, and intricate spatial relationships. To address this limitation, we employ large vision-language models (LVLMs) for multi-dimensional assessment of the alignment between generated images and their corresponding input texts. Utilizing this assessment, we fine-tune the diffusion model to enhance its alignment capabilities. During the inference phase, an initial image is produced using the fine-tuned diffusion model. The LVLM is then employed to pinpoint areas of misalignment in the initial image, which are subsequently corrected using the image editing algorithm until no further misalignments are detected by the LVLM. The resultant image is consequently more closely aligned with the input text. Our experimental results validate that the proposed methodology significantly improves text-image alignment in compositional image generation, particularly with respect to object number, attribute binding, spatial relationships, and aesthetic quality.

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent work proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies measuring the impact of various design choices throughout the whole training process. We first conduct a rigorous analysis over a three-stage training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, offline preference learning, and online preference learning. We have found that using techniques like sequence packing, loss masking in SFT, increasing the preference dataset size in DPO, and online DPO training can significantly improve the performance of language models. We then train from Gemma-2b-base and LLama-3-8b-base, and find that our best models exceed the performance of the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/Columbia-NLP-Lab/LionAlignment.

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models are typically trained with the cross-entropy loss, which forces the model outputs to be aligned verbatim with the target sentence and will highly penalize small shifts in word positions. Latent alignment models relax the explicit alignment by marginalizing out all monotonic latent alignments with the CTC loss. However, they cannot handle non-monotonic alignments, which is non-negligible as there is typically global word reordering in machine translation. In this work, we explore non-monotonic latent alignments for NAT. We extend the alignment space to non-monotonic alignments to allow for the global word reordering and further consider all alignments that overlap with the target sentence. We non-monotonically match the alignments to the target sentence and train the latent alignment model to maximize the F1 score of non-monotonic matching. Extensive experiments on major WMT benchmarks show that our method substantially improves the translation performance of CTC-based models. Our best model achieves 30.06 BLEU on WMT14 En-De with only one-iteration decoding, closing the gap between non-autoregressive and autoregressive models.

Machine learning models often struggle with distribution shifts in real-world scenarios, whereas humans exhibit robust adaptation. Models that better align with human perception may achieve higher out-of-distribution generalization. In this study, we investigate how various characteristics of large-scale computer vision models influence their alignment with human capabilities and robustness. Our findings indicate that increasing model and data size and incorporating rich semantic information and multiple modalities enhance models' alignment with human perception and their overall robustness. Our empirical analysis demonstrates a strong correlation between out-of-distribution accuracy and human alignment.

Machine learning systems are known to be sensitive to spurious correlations between biased features of the inputs (e.g., background, texture, and secondary objects) and the corresponding labels. These features and their correlations with the labels are known as "spurious" because they tend to change with shifts in real-world data distributions, which can negatively impact the model's generalization and robustness. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of this issue, along with a taxonomy of current state-of-the-art methods for addressing spurious correlations in machine learning models. Additionally, we summarize existing datasets, benchmarks, and metrics to aid future research. The paper concludes with a discussion of the recent advancements and future research challenges in this field, aiming to provide valuable insights for researchers in the related domains.

Recent developments in balancing the usefulness and safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised a critical question: Are mainstream NLP tasks adequately aligned with safety consideration? Our study, focusing on safety-sensitive documents obtained through adversarial attacks, reveals significant disparities in the safety alignment of various NLP tasks. For instance, LLMs can effectively summarize malicious long documents but often refuse to translate them. This discrepancy highlights a previously unidentified vulnerability: attacks exploiting tasks with weaker safety alignment, like summarization, can potentially compromise the integraty of tasks traditionally deemed more robust, such as translation and question-answering (QA). Moreover, the concurrent use of multiple NLP tasks with lesser safety alignment increases the risk of LLMs inadvertently processing harmful content. We demonstrate these vulnerabilities in various safety-aligned LLMs, particularly Llama2 models and GPT-4, indicating an urgent need for strengthening safety alignments across a broad spectrum of NLP tasks.

In interactions between users and language model agents, user utterances frequently exhibit ellipsis (omission of words or phrases) or imprecision (lack of exactness) to prioritize efficiency. This can lead to varying interpretations of the same input based on different assumptions or background knowledge. It is thus crucial for agents to adeptly handle the inherent ambiguity in queries to ensure reliability. However, even state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) still face challenges in such scenarios, primarily due to the following hurdles: (1) LLMs are not explicitly trained to deal with ambiguous utterances; (2) the degree of ambiguity perceived by the LLMs may vary depending on the possessed knowledge. To address these issues, we propose Alignment with Perceived Ambiguity (APA), a novel pipeline that aligns LLMs to manage ambiguous queries by leveraging their own assessment of ambiguity (i.e., perceived ambiguity). Experimental results on question-answering datasets demonstrate that APA empowers LLMs to explicitly detect and manage ambiguous queries while retaining the ability to answer clear questions. Furthermore, our finding proves that APA excels beyond training with gold-standard labels, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios.

Preference datasets are essential for incorporating human preferences into pre-trained language models, playing a key role in the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. However, these datasets often demonstrate conflicting alignment objectives, leading to increased vulnerability to jailbreak attacks and challenges in adapting downstream tasks to prioritize specific alignment objectives without negatively impacting others. In this work, we introduce a novel statistical metric, Alignment Dimension Conflict, to quantify the degree of conflict within preference datasets. We then present Hummer and its fine-grained variant, Hummer-F, as innovative pairwise preference datasets with reduced-conflict alignment objectives. Hummer is built based on UltraFeedback and is enhanced by AI feedback from GPT-4, marking as the first preference dataset aimed at reducing the competition between alignment objectives. Furthermore, we develop reward models, HummerRM and HummerRM-F, which employ a hybrid sampling approach to balance diverse alignment objectives effectively. This sampling method positions HummerRM as an ideal model for domain-specific further fine-tuning and reducing vulnerabilities to attacks.

In this article, we study the consistency of the template estimation with the Fr\'echet mean in quotient spaces. The Fr\'echet mean in quotient spaces is often used when the observations are deformed or transformed by a group action. We show that in most cases this estimator is actually inconsistent. We exhibit a sufficient condition for this inconsistency, which amounts to the folding of the distribution of the noisy template when it is projected to the quotient space. This condition appears to be fulfilled as soon as the support of the noise is large enough. To quantify this inconsistency we provide lower and upper bounds of the bias as a function of the variability (the noise level). This shows that the consistency bias cannot be neglected when the variability increases.

Understanding how language models generalize behaviors from their training to a broader deployment distribution is an important problem in AI safety. Betley et al. discovered that fine-tuning GPT-4o on intentionally insecure code causes "emergent misalignment," where models give stereotypically malicious responses to unrelated prompts. We extend this work, demonstrating emergent misalignment across diverse conditions, including reinforcement learning on reasoning models, fine-tuning on various synthetic datasets, and in models without safety training. To investigate the mechanisms behind this generalized misalignment, we apply a "model diffing" approach using sparse autoencoders to compare internal model representations before and after fine-tuning. This approach reveals several "misaligned persona" features in activation space, including a toxic persona feature which most strongly controls emergent misalignment and can be used to predict whether a model will exhibit such behavior. Additionally, we investigate mitigation strategies, discovering that fine-tuning an emergently misaligned model on just a few hundred benign samples efficiently restores alignment.

In this work, we show that it is possible to extract significant amounts of alignment training data from a post-trained model -- useful to steer the model to improve certain capabilities such as long-context reasoning, safety, instruction following, and maths. While the majority of related work on memorisation has focused on measuring success of training data extraction through string matching, we argue that embedding models are better suited for our specific goals. Distances measured through a high quality embedding model can identify semantic similarities between strings that a different metric such as edit distance will struggle to capture. In fact, in our investigation, approximate string matching would have severely undercounted (by a conservative estimate of 10times) the amount of data that can be extracted due to trivial artifacts that deflate the metric. Interestingly, we find that models readily regurgitate training data that was used in post-training phases such as SFT or RL. We show that this data can be then used to train a base model, recovering a meaningful amount of the original performance. We believe our work exposes a possibly overlooked risk towards extracting alignment data. Finally, our work opens up an interesting discussion on the downstream effects of distillation practices: since models seem to be regurgitating aspects of their training set, distillation can therefore be thought of as indirectly training on the model's original dataset.

Ranking passages by prompting a large language model (LLM) can achieve promising performance in modern information retrieval (IR) systems. A common approach is to sort the ranking list by prompting LLMs for pairwise comparison. However, sorting-based methods require consistent comparisons to correctly sort the passages, which we show that LLMs often violate. We identify two kinds of intrinsic inconsistency in LLM-based pairwise comparisons: order inconsistency which leads to conflicting results when switching the passage order, and transitive inconsistency which leads to non-transitive triads among all preference pairs. In this paper, we propose LLM-RankFusion, an LLM-based ranking framework that mitigates these inconsistencies and produces a robust ranking list. LLM-RankFusion mitigates order inconsistency using in-context learning (ICL) to demonstrate order-agnostic comparisons and calibration to estimate the underlying preference probability between two passages. We then address transitive inconsistency by aggregating the ranking results from multiple rankers. In our experiments, we empirically show that LLM-RankFusion can significantly reduce inconsistent pairwise comparison results, and improve the ranking quality by making the final ranking list more robust.

Harmful fine-tuning issue qi2023fine poses serious safety concerns for Large language models' fine-tuning-as-a-service. While existing defenses huang2024vaccine,rosati2024representation have been proposed to mitigate the issue, their performances are still far away from satisfactory, and the root cause of the problem has not been fully recovered. For the first time in the literature, we in this paper show that harmful perturbation over the model weights should be the root cause of alignment-broken of harmful fine-tuning. In order to attenuate the negative impact of harmful perturbation, we propose an alignment-stage solution, dubbed Booster. Technically, along with the original alignment loss, we append a loss regularizer in the alignment stage's optimization. The regularizer ensures that the model's harmful loss reduction before/after simulated harmful perturbation is attenuated, thereby mitigating the subsequent fine-tuning risk. Empirical results show that Booster can effectively reduce the harmful score of the fine-tuned models while maintaining the performance of downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Booster.

Foundation models, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), have lately gained wide-spread attention and adoption. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) involves training a reward model to capture desired behaviors, which is then used to align LLM's. These reward models are additionally used at inference-time to estimate LLM responses' adherence to those desired behaviors. However, there is little work measuring how robust these reward models are to distribution shifts. In this work, we evaluate how reward model performance - measured via accuracy and calibration (i.e. alignment between accuracy and confidence) - is affected by distribution shift. We show novel calibration patterns and accuracy drops due to OOD prompts and responses, and that the reward model is more sensitive to shifts in responses than prompts. Additionally, we adapt an OOD detection technique commonly used in classification to the reward model setting to detect these distribution shifts in prompts and responses.

The ability to translate diverse patterns of inputs into structured patterns of behavior has been thought to rest on both humans' and machines' ability to learn robust representations of relevant concepts. The rapid advancement of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has led to a diversity of computational ingredients -- architectures, fine tuning methods, and training datasets among others -- but it remains unclear which of these ingredients are most crucial for building models that develop human-like representations. Further, most current LLM benchmarks are not suited to measuring representational alignment between humans and models, making benchmark scores unreliable for assessing if current LLMs are making progress towards becoming useful cognitive models. We address these limitations by first evaluating a set of over 70 models that widely vary in their computational ingredients on a triplet similarity task, a method well established in the cognitive sciences for measuring human conceptual representations, using concepts from the THINGS database. Comparing human and model representations, we find that models that undergo instruction-finetuning and which have larger dimensionality of attention heads are among the most human aligned, while multimodal pretraining and parameter size have limited bearing on alignment. Correlations between alignment scores and scores on existing benchmarks reveal that while some benchmarks (e.g., MMLU) are better suited than others (e.g., MUSR) for capturing representational alignment, no existing benchmark is capable of fully accounting for the variance of alignment scores, demonstrating their insufficiency in capturing human-AI alignment. Taken together, our findings help highlight the computational ingredients most essential for advancing LLMs towards models of human conceptual representation and address a key benchmarking gap in LLM evaluation.

Aligned instruction following models can better fulfill user requests than their unaligned counterparts. However, it has been shown that there is a length bias in evaluation of such models, and that training algorithms tend to exploit this bias by learning longer responses. In this work we show how to train models that can be controlled at inference time with instructions containing desired length constraints. Such models are superior in length instructed evaluations, outperforming standard instruction following models such as GPT4, Llama 3 and Mixtral.

Semantics of a sentence is defined with much less ambiguity than semantics of a single word, and it should be better preserved by translation to another language. If multilingual sentence embeddings intend to represent sentence semantics, then the similarity between embeddings of any two sentences must be invariant with respect to translation. Based on this suggestion, we consider a simple linear cross-lingual mapping as a possible improvement of the multilingual embeddings. We also consider deviation from orthogonality conditions as a measure of deficiency of the embeddings.

The growing awareness of safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) has sparked considerable interest in the evaluation of safety within current research endeavors. This study investigates an interesting issue pertaining to the evaluation of LLMs, namely the substantial discrepancy in performance between multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions. Inspired by research on jailbreak attack patterns, we argue this is caused by mismatched generalization. That is, the LLM does not have a comprehensive understanding of the complex concept of safety. Instead, it only remembers what to answer for open-ended safety questions, which makes it unable to solve other forms of safety tests. We refer to this phenomenon as fake alignment and construct a comparative benchmark to empirically verify its existence in LLMs. Such fake alignment renders previous evaluation protocols unreliable. To address this, we introduce the Fake alIgNment Evaluation (FINE) framework and two novel metrics--Consistency Score (CS) and Consistent Safety Score (CSS), which jointly assess two complementary forms of evaluation to quantify fake alignment and obtain corrected performance estimates. Applying FINE to 14 widely-used LLMs reveals several models with purported safety are poorly aligned in practice. Our work highlights potential limitations in prevailing alignment methodologies.

Word alignments are useful for tasks like statistical and neural machine translation (NMT) and cross-lingual annotation projection. Statistical word aligners perform well, as do methods that extract alignments jointly with translations in NMT. However, most approaches require parallel training data, and quality decreases as less training data is available. We propose word alignment methods that require no parallel data. The key idea is to leverage multilingual word embeddings, both static and contextualized, for word alignment. Our multilingual embeddings are created from monolingual data only without relying on any parallel data or dictionaries. We find that alignments created from embeddings are superior for four and comparable for two language pairs compared to those produced by traditional statistical aligners, even with abundant parallel data; e.g., contextualized embeddings achieve a word alignment F1 for English-German that is 5 percentage points higher than eflomal, a high-quality statistical aligner, trained on 100k parallel sentences.

It is inherently ambiguous to lift 2D results from pre-trained diffusion models to a 3D world for text-to-3D generation. 2D diffusion models solely learn view-agnostic priors and thus lack 3D knowledge during the lifting, leading to the multi-view inconsistency problem. We find that this problem primarily stems from geometric inconsistency, and avoiding misplaced geometric structures substantially mitigates the problem in the final outputs. Therefore, we improve the consistency by aligning the 2D geometric priors in diffusion models with well-defined 3D shapes during the lifting, addressing the vast majority of the problem. This is achieved by fine-tuning the 2D diffusion model to be viewpoint-aware and to produce view-specific coordinate maps of canonically oriented 3D objects. In our process, only coarse 3D information is used for aligning. This "coarse" alignment not only resolves the multi-view inconsistency in geometries but also retains the ability in 2D diffusion models to generate detailed and diversified high-quality objects unseen in the 3D datasets. Furthermore, our aligned geometric priors (AGP) are generic and can be seamlessly integrated into various state-of-the-art pipelines, obtaining high generalizability in terms of unseen shapes and visual appearance while greatly alleviating the multi-view inconsistency problem. Our method represents a new state-of-the-art performance with an 85+% consistency rate by human evaluation, while many previous methods are around 30%. Our project page is https://sweetdreamer3d.github.io/

We introduce Aligner, a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method for aligning multi-billion-parameter-sized Large Language Models (LLMs). Aligner employs a unique design that constructs a globally shared set of tunable tokens that modify the attention of every layer. Remarkably with this method, even when using one token accounting for a mere 5,000 parameters, Aligner can still perform comparably well to state-of-the-art LLM adaptation methods like LoRA that require millions of parameters. This capacity is substantiated in both instruction following and value alignment tasks. Besides the multiple order-of-magnitude improvement in parameter efficiency, the insight Aligner provides into the internal mechanisms of LLMs is also valuable. The architectural features and efficacy of our method, in addition to our experiments demonstrate that an LLM separates its internal handling of "form" and "knowledge" in a somewhat orthogonal manner. This finding promises to motivate new research into LLM mechanism understanding and value alignment.

Large language models (LLMs) can handle a wide variety of general tasks with simple prompts, without the need for task-specific training. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built upon LLMs, have demonstrated impressive potential in tackling complex tasks involving visual, auditory, and textual data. However, critical issues related to truthfulness, safety, o1-like reasoning, and alignment with human preference remain insufficiently addressed. This gap has spurred the emergence of various alignment algorithms, each targeting different application scenarios and optimization goals. Recent studies have shown that alignment algorithms are a powerful approach to resolving the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of alignment algorithms for MLLMs. Specifically, we explore four key aspects: (1) the application scenarios covered by alignment algorithms, including general image understanding, multi-image, video, and audio, and extended multimodal applications; (2) the core factors in constructing alignment datasets, including data sources, model responses, and preference annotations; (3) the benchmarks used to evaluate alignment algorithms; and (4) a discussion of potential future directions for the development of alignment algorithms. This work seeks to help researchers organize current advancements in the field and inspire better alignment methods. The project page of this paper is available at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models/tree/Alignment.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates robust evaluation methodologies. Current benchmarking approaches often rely on comparing model outputs against predefined prompts and reference outputs. Relying on predefined reference outputs hinders flexible adaptation of benchmarks to the rapidly evolving capabilities of LLMs. This limitation necessitates periodic efforts to prepare new benchmarks. To keep pace with rapidly evolving LLM capabilities, we propose a more flexible benchmarking approach. Our method, \textbf{Varco Arena}, provides reference-free benchmarking of LLMs in tournament style. \textbf{Varco Arena} directly compares LLM outputs across a diverse set of prompts, determining model rankings through a single-elimination tournament structure. This direct pairwise comparison offers two key advantages: (1) Direct comparison, unmediated by reference text, more effectively orders competing LLMs, resulting in more reliable rankings, and (2) reference-free approach to benchmarking adds flexibility in updating benchmark prompts by eliminating the need for quality references. Our empirical results, supported by simulation experiments, demonstrate that the \textbf{Varco Arena} tournament approach aligns better with the current Elo model for benchmarking LLMs. The alignment is measured in terms of Spearman correlation, showing improvement over current practice of benchmarking that use reference outputs as comparison anchors.

Recently, Ainsworth et al. showed that using weight matching (WM) to minimize the L_2 distance in a permutation search of model parameters effectively identifies permutations that satisfy linear mode connectivity (LMC), in which the loss along a linear path between two independently trained models with different seeds remains nearly constant. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of LMC using WM, which is crucial for understanding stochastic gradient descent's effectiveness and its application in areas like model merging. We first experimentally and theoretically show that permutations found by WM do not significantly reduce the L_2 distance between two models and the occurrence of LMC is not merely due to distance reduction by WM in itself. We then provide theoretical insights showing that permutations can change the directions of the singular vectors, but not the singular values, of the weight matrices in each layer. This finding shows that permutations found by WM mainly align the directions of singular vectors associated with large singular values across models. This alignment brings the singular vectors with large singular values, which determine the model functionality, closer between pre-merged and post-merged models, so that the post-merged model retains functionality similar to the pre-merged models, making it easy to satisfy LMC. Finally, we analyze the difference between WM and straight-through estimator (STE), a dataset-dependent permutation search method, and show that WM outperforms STE, especially when merging three or more models.

Recent work has shown that narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While concerning, these findings were limited to finetuning and activation steering, leaving out in-context learning (ICL). We therefore ask: does EM emerge in ICL? We find that it does: across three datasets, three frontier models produce broadly misaligned responses at rates between 2% and 17% given 64 narrow in-context examples, and up to 58% with 256 examples. We also examine mechanisms of EM by eliciting step-by-step reasoning (while leaving in-context examples unchanged). Manual analysis of the resulting chain-of-thought shows that 67.5% of misaligned traces explicitly rationalize harmful outputs by adopting a reckless or dangerous ''persona'', echoing prior results on finetuning-induced EM.

We present a corpus of sentence-aligned triples of German audio, German text, and English translation, based on German audiobooks. The speech translation data consist of 110 hours of audio material aligned to over 50k parallel sentences. An even larger dataset comprising 547 hours of German speech aligned to German text is available for speech recognition. The audio data is read speech and thus low in disfluencies. The quality of audio and sentence alignments has been checked by a manual evaluation, showing that speech alignment quality is in general very high. The sentence alignment quality is comparable to well-used parallel translation data and can be adjusted by cutoffs on the automatic alignment score. To our knowledge, this corpus is to date the largest resource for German speech recognition and for end-to-end German-to-English speech translation.

We study unsupervised multilingual alignment, the problem of finding word-to-word translations between multiple languages without using any parallel data. One popular strategy is to reduce multilingual alignment to the much simplified bilingual setting, by picking one of the input languages as the pivot language that we transit through. However, it is well-known that transiting through a poorly chosen pivot language (such as English) may severely degrade the translation quality, since the assumed transitive relations among all pairs of languages may not be enforced in the training process. Instead of going through a rather arbitrarily chosen pivot language, we propose to use the Wasserstein barycenter as a more informative "mean" language: it encapsulates information from all languages and minimizes all pairwise transportation costs. We evaluate our method on standard benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performances.

Traditionally, success in multilingual machine translation can be attributed to three key factors in training data: large volume, diverse translation directions, and high quality. In the current practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for translation, we revisit the importance of all these factors. We find that LLMs display strong translation capability after being fine-tuned on as few as 32 training instances, and that fine-tuning on a single translation direction effectively enables LLMs to translate in multiple directions. However, the choice of direction is critical: fine-tuning LLMs with English on the target side can lead to task misinterpretation, which hinders translations into non-English languages. A similar problem arises when noise is introduced into the target side of parallel data, especially when the target language is well-represented in the LLM's pre-training. In contrast, noise in an under-represented language has a less pronounced effect. Our findings suggest that attaining successful alignment hinges on teaching the model to maintain a "superficial" focus, thereby avoiding the learning of erroneous biases beyond translation.