Lying Is Just a Phase: The Hidden Alignment Transition in Language Model Scaling
The paper discusses the relationship between reasoning and truthfulness in language models as they scale. It identifies a critical scale where capabilities transition from anticorrelation to cooperation. The findings suggest that factors like architecture and data curation significantly influence this transition.
- ▪The study measures the coupling between reasoning and truthfulness across 63 base models from 16 families.
- ▪A critical scale, approximately 3.5 billion parameters, marks a regime change in model capabilities.
- ▪Data curation and architectural innovations can independently shift the critical scale for model performance.
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Record
| Original publisher | arXiv cs.AI |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18838 |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T04:04:59.484Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T04:04:59.484Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4V6kOS77e8FL |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2605.18838 (cs) [Submitted on 13 May 2026] Title:Lying Is Just a Phase: The Hidden Alignment Transition in Language Model Scaling Authors:Adil Amin View a PDF of the paper titled Lying Is Just a Phase: The Hidden Alignment Transition in Language Model Scaling, by Adil Amin View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Scaling laws predict loss from compute but not how capabilities interact. We measure the coupling between reasoning and truthfulness across 63 base models from 16 families and find a regime change invisible to loss curves: below a family-dependent critical scale $N_c$, capabilities anticorrelate; above it, they cooperate.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv cs.AI.
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