Helpfulness Hurts: Domain-Dependent Degradation of Mid-Trained Compassion Values Under Post-Training

arXiv:2606.26102v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard post-training pipelines apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to make language models helpful, but these processes may inadvertently degrade values instilled during pre-training. We investigate whether the domain of post-training data differentially affects the retention of animal compassion values in a Llama 3.1 8B model mid-trained on compassion-oriented synthetic data, using both SFT (helpfulness v

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ethics.ai (14 July 2026), “Helpfulness Hurts: Domain-Dependent Degradation of Mid-Trained Compassion Values Under Post-Training,” evidence record 10070, https://ethics.ai/record/10070 (originally published by arXiv cs.CY).

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