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Related papers: Immunization against harmful fine-tuning attacks

200 papers

Fine-tuning is a common and effective method for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specialized tasks and applications. In this paper, we study the privacy implications of fine-tuning LLMs on user data. To this end, we consider a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Nikhil Kandpal , Krishna Pillutla , Alina Oprea , Peter Kairouz , Christopher A. Choquette-Choo , Zheng Xu

Harmful fine-tuning attack introduces significant security risks to the fine-tuning services. Main-stream defenses aim to vaccinate the model such that the later harmful fine-tuning attack is less effective. However, our evaluation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Yibo Wang , Tiansheng Huang , Li Shen , Huanjin Yao , Haotian Luo , Rui Liu , Naiqiang Tan , Jiaxing Huang , Dacheng Tao

Most prior safety research of large language models (LLMs) has focused on enhancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit the safety requirements of humans. However, internalizing such safeguard features into larger models brought challenges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Ohjoon Kwon , Donghyeon Jeon , Nayoung Choi , Gyu-Hwung Cho , Changbong Kim , Hyunwoo Lee , Inho Kang , Sun Kim , Taiwoo Park

The increasing use of large language models (LLMs) trained by third parties raises significant security concerns. In particular, malicious actors can introduce backdoors through poisoning attacks to generate undesirable outputs. While such…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Shuli Jiang , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Yi Zhou , Farhan Ahmed , Ling Cai , Nathalie Baracaldo

The prevalence and strong capability of large language models (LLMs) present significant safety and ethical risks if exploited by malicious users. To prevent the potentially deceptive usage of LLMs, recent works have proposed algorithms to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Zhouxing Shi , Yihan Wang , Fan Yin , Xiangning Chen , Kai-Wei Chang , Cho-Jui Hsieh

This paper introduces MetaDefense, a novel framework for defending against finetuning-based jailbreak attacks in large language models (LLMs). We observe that existing defense mechanisms fail to generalize to harmful queries disguised by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Weisen Jiang , Sinno Jialin Pan

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense utility across various industries. However, as LLMs advance, the risk of harmful outputs increases due to incorrect or malicious instruction prompts. While current methods effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Xinyi Zeng , Yuying Shang , Jiawei Chen , Jingyuan Zhang , Yu Tian

Recent studies have uncovered a troubling vulnerability in the fine-tuning stage of large language models (LLMs): even fine-tuning on entirely benign datasets can lead to a significant increase in the harmfulness of LLM outputs. Building on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zihan Guan , Mengxuan Hu , Ronghang Zhu , Sheng Li , Anil Vullikanti

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in security-sensitive applications, where they must follow system- or developer-specified instructions that define the intended task behavior, while completing benign user requests.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Li , Chenxiao Yu , Zhiyu Ni , Hao Li , Charith Peris , Chaowei Xiao , Yue Zhao

Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training…

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized various applications by providing advanced natural language processing capabilities. However, this innovation introduces new cybersecurity challenges. This paper explores the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Stephen Burabari Tete

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread adoption across various domains, including chatbots and auto-task completion agents. However, these models are susceptible to safety vulnerabilities such as jailbreaking, prompt injection,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Divyanshu Kumar , Anurakt Kumar , Sahil Agarwal , Prashanth Harshangi

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the ability to effectively tackle various downstream NLP tasks and unify these tasks into generative pipelines. On the one hand, powerful language models, trained on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Haoran Li , Yulin Chen , Jinglong Luo , Jiecong Wang , Hao Peng , Yan Kang , Xiaojin Zhang , Qi Hu , Chunkit Chan , Zenglin Xu , Bryan Hooi , Yangqiu Song

LLM developers have imposed technical interventions to prevent fine-tuning misuse attacks, attacks where adversaries evade safeguards by fine-tuning the model using a public API. Previous work has established several successful attacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xander Davies , Eric Winsor , Alexandra Souly , Tomek Korbak , Robert Kirk , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Yarin Gal

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents have been widely deployed in a wide range of applications in the real world, including healthcare diagnostics, financial analysis, customer support, robotics, and autonomous driving,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Wenrui Xu , Keshab K. Parhi

The recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) when exposed to malicious inputs. While various defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these threats, there has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Tianlong Li , Zhenghua Wang , Wenhao Liu , Muling Wu , Shihan Dou , Changze Lv , Xiaohua Wang , Xiaoqing Zheng , Xuanjing Huang

This paper explores the pressing issue of risk assessment in Large Language Models (LLMs) as they become increasingly prevalent in various applications. Focusing on how reward models, which are designed to fine-tune pretrained LLMs to align…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Bahareh Harandizadeh , Abel Salinas , Fred Morstatter

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into educational applications. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak and fine-tuning attacks, which can compromise safety alignment and lead to harmful outputs. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Xin Yi , Yue Li , Dongsheng Shi , Linlin Wang , Xiaoling Wang , Liang He

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

Although safely enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tackling various complex tasks in a zero-shot manner, they remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks, particularly the unknown jailbreak attack. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Fan Liu , Zhao Xu , Hao Liu