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Autore principale: Terry, Owen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04369
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author Terry, Owen
author_facet Terry, Owen
contents Fine-tuned LLMs often exhibit unexpected behavior as a result of generalizing beyond the data they're shown. We present results in which an LLM fine-tuned to prefer either coastal sports teams or Southern sports teams adopt political beliefs that diverge significantly from those of the base model. While we hypothesized that the coastal model would become more liberal and the southern model would become more conservative, we find that their responses are usually similar to each other, without a clear-cut liberal or conservative bias. In addition to asking the models for numerical ratings of agreement with relevant political statements, we ask them to elaborate on their more radical answers, finding varying degrees of willingness to justify themselves. Further work is needed to understand the mechanisms by which fine-tuning on simple, narrow datasets leads to seemingly unrelated changes in model behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_04369
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalization to Political Beliefs from Fine-Tuning on Sports Team Preferences
Terry, Owen
Physics and Society
Computation and Language
Fine-tuned LLMs often exhibit unexpected behavior as a result of generalizing beyond the data they're shown. We present results in which an LLM fine-tuned to prefer either coastal sports teams or Southern sports teams adopt political beliefs that diverge significantly from those of the base model. While we hypothesized that the coastal model would become more liberal and the southern model would become more conservative, we find that their responses are usually similar to each other, without a clear-cut liberal or conservative bias. In addition to asking the models for numerical ratings of agreement with relevant political statements, we ask them to elaborate on their more radical answers, finding varying degrees of willingness to justify themselves. Further work is needed to understand the mechanisms by which fine-tuning on simple, narrow datasets leads to seemingly unrelated changes in model behavior.
title Generalization to Political Beliefs from Fine-Tuning on Sports Team Preferences
topic Physics and Society
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04369