Morning Edition · Friday, June 26, 2026Published at 6:45 AM EDT · New York

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…