Bliss Reading Group - April 27

​We start the latest season of the Bliss Reading Group with 3 papers on Alignment in AI hosted by Jonas Loos and Tom Neuhäuser, beginning with Persona Features Control Emergent Misalignment from Wang, et al (2025).

​Building on the earlier discovery of "emergent misalignment", Wang et al. dig into why this happens. Using sparse autoencoders to compare model internals before and after fine-tuning, they identify a set of "misaligned persona" features in activation space which appear to control this behaviour.

​The paper raises compelling questions for discussion: Why does narrow bad-advice training activate these broad persona features? How reliable are SAE-based mitigations in practice? And what does this tell us about the internal "character" that models develop through training?

​Join us for a lively and interesting discussion!