Operationalising the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis via Task Complexity

Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves with additional compute, but not what skills it acquires in which order. To remedy this, we propose the Implicit Curriculum Hypothesis: pretraining follows a compositional and predictable curriculum across models and data mixtures. We test this by designing a suite of simple, composable tasks spanning retrieval, morphological transformations, coreference, logical reasoning, and mathematics. Using these tasks, we track emergence points across four model families spanning sizes from 410M-13B parameters. We find that emergence orderings of when models reach fixed accuracy thresholds are strikingly consistent ($ρ= .81$ across 45 model pairs), and that composite tasks most often emerge after their component tasks. Furthermore, we find that this structure is encoded in model representations: tasks with similar function vector representations also tend to follow similar trajectories in training. By using the space of representations derived from our task set, we can effectively predict the training trajectories of simple held-out compositional tasks throughout the course of pretraining ($R^2 = .68$-$.84$ across models) without previously evaluating them. Together, these results suggest that pretraining is more structured than loss curves reveal: skills emerge in a compositional order that is consistent across models and readable from their internals.

Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks. While prior work suggests that task adaptation can alter a model's pre-existing alignment, especially its safety behavior, its broader effects across alignment domains remain poorly understood. We address this gap through a systematic evaluation of representative task-adaptation methods, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT), KL-regularized SFT, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) across 15 alignment aspects spanning six key domains: safety, factuality, stance stability, social harm, controllability, and instructability. Our results reveal that post-training does not reshape alignment uniformly. RLVR improves task performance while inducing comparatively small, but non-zero, metric-specific shifts, while SFT leads to substantially larger alignment drift across domains. KL regularization mitigates this effect: stronger reference-model anchoring reduces alignment drift from the baseline, although KL-SFT still falls short of RLVR in preserving alignment. Representation-level analysis further supports this pattern, with shifts in alignment-relevant representations tracking behavioral drift. Together, these results show that task adaptation is not merely a capability-improving step, but an alignment intervention in its own right, motivating multi-dimensional alignment evaluation as a standard component of post-training pipelines.

Dense linear probes assess task readability from language model (LM) representations, but do not directly reveal how many features suffice for prediction. We measure readout sparsity with $k^*$, the smallest feature count found by a fixed search protocol that recovers 95% of dense-probe AUROC above chance. We evaluate 19 LMs from five labs on 14 core tasks. Ten base models give the nine reliably readable tasks similar feature counts and nearly the same order. This agreement extends to the selected features themselves, which on three tasks show cross-model response correspondence beyond class-mean differences and a label-correlation-matched null. Instruction-tuned deployment selectively reduces $k^*$, with both weights and input format contributing. In controlled synthetic experiments across 20 models, successfully learned targets admit single-feature readouts, whereas readable controls require tens of features. Reference-model $k^*$ is associated with label requirements across eight students, following an empirical scaling of $N^*\propto(k^*)^{0.65}$. After continual learning, saved heads can fail while linear readability remains high, and recovery requires fewer labels than initial task learning under the tested procedures. Pruning reduces linear readability, with wider pre-pruning readouts generally associated with larger losses. These findings distinguish task readability from readout sparsity and establish their complementary value for predicting learning requirements and diagnosing LM changes.