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Morning Edition · Friday, June 26, 2026
Study Finds Standard Post-Training Can Erode Values Instilled During Pretraining
Optimizing models to be helpful through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning degraded compassion-related behaviors in some domains, the paper reports.
A new paper, Helpfulness Hurts: Domain-Dependent Degradation of Mid-Trained Compassion Values Under Post-Training, examines a side effect of the standard alignment pipeline. Supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning are applied to m…
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