Metaphors are a Source of Cross-Domain Misalignment of Large Reasoning Models

Abstract

Earlier research has shown that metaphors influence human decision-making, raising the question of whether metaphors also influence large language models (LLMs)' reasoning pathways, given that their training data contain a large number of metaphors. In this work, we investigate the problem in the scope of the emergent misalignment problem, where LLMs can generalize patterns learned from misaligned content in one domain to another domain. We find strong evidence that metaphors in training data contribute to cross-domain misalignment in LLMs' reasoning outputs. With metaphor-based interventions during continued pre-training and fine-tuning for inducing misalignment, models exhibit significantly different degrees of emergent cross-domain misalignment. We also observe similar effects in re-alignment settings. As we further investigate this phenomenon, we find that metaphors are linked to the activation of latent features in large reasoning models. By monitoring these latent features, we design a detector that predicts misaligned content with high accuracy.