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Alignment Inertia: Auditing the Durability of Training Data Influence Through Policy Override Resistance

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 23, 2026 · UTC

Platform operators increasingly rely on system prompts and fine-tuning to govern model behavior, yet it remains unclear how reliably these interventions override behavior inherited from prior training. We propose Override Success Rate (OSR) and alignment inertia to measure when operator interventions succeed or fail to change prior behavior. We evaluate zero-shot prompting and LoRA fine-tuning across Llama and Mistral in medical misinformation and hate speech. Alignment inertia persists across both models but varies by model, domain, and policy direction. Notably, in Mistral's restrictive hate

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