“Emergent Misalignment on a Budget” by Valerio Pepe

TL;DR We reproduce emergent misalignment (Betley et al. 2025) in Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct using single-layer LoRA finetuning, showing that tweaking even one layer can lead to toxic or insecure outputs. We then extract steering vectors from those LoRAs (with a method derived from the Mechanisms of Awareness blogpost) and use them to induce similarly misaligned behavior in an un-finetuned version of the same model.

We take the results to support two main claims:

1. Single-layer LoRAs are sufficient to induce emergent misalignment.
    
2. Steering vectors derived from those LoRAs can partially replicate their effects — showing strong correlation between direction and behavior, but not enough to suggest EM can be captured by a steering vector at one layer.

This may suggest that emergent misalignment is a distributed phenomenon: directional, but not reducible to any single layer or vector.

Reproducing Previous Results

For our intents in this post, we will be summarizing Betley [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 8th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qHudHZNLCiFrygRiy/emergent-misalignment-on-a-budget

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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