Not All Misalignment Is Alike: A Decomposed Benchmark for Emergent Misalignment

arXiv:2611.08569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM), in which fine-tuning on a narrow task induces misaligned behaviour on unrelated prompts, has been demonstrated across a wide range of datasets, model families, and training setups. Yet, most studies continue to rely on the evaluation approach introduced in the original EM paper, producing rates that are sensitive to the small set of evaluation questions used, the choice of judge, and the thresholds applied. These evaluations can also conflate misalignment with capability loss and offer little insight into the specific ways misalignment manifests. Differences in datasets, models, and fine-tuning configurations further make findings difficult to compare across studies.