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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13076 |
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| _version_ | 1866910184651096064 |
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| author | Brazilek, Jasmine Tidmarsh, Miles |
| author_facet | Brazilek, Jasmine Tidmarsh, Miles |
| contents | We investigate the robustness of value alignment via midtraining with synthetic documents, using animal compassion as a value that is both important in its own right and orthogonal to existing alignment efforts. To evaluate compassionate reasoning, we develop and publicly release Animal Norms In Moral Assessment (ANIMA), a 26-question evaluation spanning 13 ethical dimensions, publicly available as a dataset and Inspect evaluation. On ANIMA, training with 3000 documents achieves 77% compared to 40% for instruction-tuning approaches, with generalization to human compassion and no degradation in standard safety benchmarks or capabilities. However, subsequent unrelated instruction-tuning degrades the intervention, with the advantage disappearing after 5000 samples. Our exploratory results suggest document-based value interventions may require explicit preservation strategies to remain effective through typical training pipelines. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_13076 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Alignment midtraining for animals Brazilek, Jasmine Tidmarsh, Miles Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence We investigate the robustness of value alignment via midtraining with synthetic documents, using animal compassion as a value that is both important in its own right and orthogonal to existing alignment efforts. To evaluate compassionate reasoning, we develop and publicly release Animal Norms In Moral Assessment (ANIMA), a 26-question evaluation spanning 13 ethical dimensions, publicly available as a dataset and Inspect evaluation. On ANIMA, training with 3000 documents achieves 77% compared to 40% for instruction-tuning approaches, with generalization to human compassion and no degradation in standard safety benchmarks or capabilities. However, subsequent unrelated instruction-tuning degrades the intervention, with the advantage disappearing after 5000 samples. Our exploratory results suggest document-based value interventions may require explicit preservation strategies to remain effective through typical training pipelines. |
| title | Alignment midtraining for animals |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13076 |