Are Dilemmas and Conflicts in LLM Alignment Solvable? A View from Priority Graph

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Tang, Zhenheng, Liu, Xiang, Wang, Qian, Choi, Eunsol, Li, Bo, Chu, Xiaowen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Tang, Zhenheng
Liu, Xiang
Wang, Qian
Choi, Eunsol
Li, Bo
Chu, Xiaowen
author_facet Tang, Zhenheng
Liu, Xiang
Wang, Qian
Choi, Eunsol
Li, Bo
Chu, Xiaowen
contents As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more powerful and autonomous, they increasingly face conflicts and dilemmas in many scenarios. We first summarize and taxonomize these diverse conflicts. Then, we model the LLM's preferences to make different choices as a priority graph, where instructions and values are nodes, and the edges represent context-specific priorities determined by the model's output distribution. This graph reveals that a unified stable LLM alignment is very challenging, because the graph is neither static nor necessarily consistent in different contexts. Besides, it also reveals a potential vulnerability: priority hacking, where adversaries can craft deceptive contexts to manipulate the graph and bypass safety alignments. To counter this, we propose a runtime verification mechanism, enabling LLMs to query external sources to ground their context and resist manipulation. While this approach enhances robustness, we also acknowledge that many ethical and value dilemmas are philosophically irreducible, posing a long-term, open challenge for the future of AI alignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Are Dilemmas and Conflicts in LLM Alignment Solvable? A View from Priority Graph
Tang, Zhenheng
Liu, Xiang
Wang, Qian
Choi, Eunsol
Li, Bo
Chu, Xiaowen
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more powerful and autonomous, they increasingly face conflicts and dilemmas in many scenarios. We first summarize and taxonomize these diverse conflicts. Then, we model the LLM's preferences to make different choices as a priority graph, where instructions and values are nodes, and the edges represent context-specific priorities determined by the model's output distribution. This graph reveals that a unified stable LLM alignment is very challenging, because the graph is neither static nor necessarily consistent in different contexts. Besides, it also reveals a potential vulnerability: priority hacking, where adversaries can craft deceptive contexts to manipulate the graph and bypass safety alignments. To counter this, we propose a runtime verification mechanism, enabling LLMs to query external sources to ground their context and resist manipulation. While this approach enhances robustness, we also acknowledge that many ethical and value dilemmas are philosophically irreducible, posing a long-term, open challenge for the future of AI alignment.
title Are Dilemmas and Conflicts in LLM Alignment Solvable? A View from Priority Graph
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15527