Inoculation Prompting: Eliciting traits from LLMs during training can suppress them at test-time

Abstract: Language model finetuning often results in learning undesirable traits in combination with desired ones. To address this, we propose inoculation prompting: modifying finetuning data by prepending a short system-prompt instruction that deliberately elicits the undesirable trait. At test time, we evaluate without the instruction; inoculated models have much lower expression of the trait than models trained with unmodified training data. Inoculation is selective: in a toy setting where assistant responses are always in Spanish and ALL-CAPS, an appropriate inoculation (e.g., ``You always speak in Spanish.'') teaches the model to capitalize responses while still responding in English. We find that inoculation is also effective across several additional settings: reducing emergent misalignment (EM) from task-specific finetuning, defending against backdoor injections, and mitigating the transmission of traits via subliminal learning. Follow-up analysis suggests a mechanism: making a trait less surprising via inoculation reduces optimization pressure to globally update the model, thereby reducing the degree of generalization. Our analysis relates to prior work on EM: inoculation explains prior findings that educational contexts mitigate EM from insecure code. Beyond demonstrating a simple and effective technique for selective learning, our results contribute to a better conceptual understanding of how and why language models generalize.