Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly harmful datasets can lead to misalignment broadly, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment (EM). EM poses a challenge for AI safety and our understanding of LLMs. Prior work often frames EM as an unexpected behavior, and explains it by appealing to general misalignment directions or anthropomorphizing it as acquiring an evil persona. However, the mechanisms behind these framings remain obscure. In this work, we show that EM is a predictable and data-dependent generalization phenomenon. By examining the base model’s representation of EM training data and evaluation prompts, we find that evilness after EM training is highly predictable from representational distance: the closer an evaluation prompt is to training data centroid, the more evilness it elicits from EM models after training (with an average Spearman correlation of -0.73 across 12 model-dataset settings). Building upon this analysis, we further demystify EM by showing that (1) its effectiveness changes significantly based on training data format; (2) there is not a general misalignment direction that transfers across different EM models; (3) the effect of EM is fundamentally different from persona changes. Furthermore, we extend the EM generalization metric from a scalar distance to a dataset-specific generalization direction, which robustly predicts EM models’ evilness under semantics-preserving prompt perturbations including appending random tokens and paraphrasing, where other methods do not reliably generalize.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for automating the evaluation of natural language generation. Previous frameworks of LLM-as-a-judge fall short in two ways: they either use zero-shot setting without consulting any human input, which leads to low alignment, or fine-tune LLMs on labeled data, which requires a non-trivial number of samples. Moreover, previous methods often provide little reasoning behind automated evaluations. In this paper, we propose HypoEval, Hypothesis-guided Evaluation framework, which first uses a small corpus of human evaluations to generate more detailed rubrics for human judgments and then incorporates a checklist-like approach to combine LLM’s assigned scores on each decomposed dimension to acquire overall scores. With only 30 human evaluations, HypoEval achieves state-of-the-art performance in alignment with both human rankings (Spearman correlation) and human scores (Pearson correlation), on average outperforming G-Eval by 11.86% and fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with at least 3 times more human evaluations by 11.95%. Furthermore, we conduct systematic studies to assess the robustness of HypoEval, highlighting its effectiveness as a reliable and interpretable automated evaluation framework.

AI holds promise for transforming scientific processes, including hypothesis generation. Prior work on hypothesis generation can be broadly categorized into theory-driven and data-driven approaches. While both have proven effective in generating novel and plausible hypotheses, it remains an open question whether they can complement each other. To address this, we develop the first method that combines literature-based insights with data to perform LLM-powered hypothesis generation. We apply our method on five different datasets and demonstrate that integrating literature and data outperforms other baselines (8.97% over few-shot, 15.75% over literature-based alone, and 3.37% over data-driven alone). Additionally, we conduct the first human evaluation to assess the utility of LLM-generated hypotheses in assisting human decision-making on two challenging tasks: deception detection and AI generated content detection. Our results show that human accuracy improves significantly by 7.44% and 14.19% on these tasks, respectively. These findings suggest that integrating literature-based and data-driven approaches provides a comprehensive and nuanced framework for hypothesis generation and could open new avenues for scientific inquiry.