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Related papers: Guardrail Baselines for Unlearning in LLMs

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Maintaining the safety of large language models (LLMs) is crucial as they are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Existing safety guardrails typically rely on single-pass classification or, more recently, distilled reasoning.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siddharth Sai , Xiaofei Wen , Muhao Chen

We propose a lightweight explainable guardrail (LEG) method to detect unsafe prompts. LEG uses a multi-task learning architecture to jointly learn a prompt classifier and an explanation classifier, where the latter labels prompt words that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Md Asiful Islam , Mihai Surdeanu

Given the prevalence of large language models (LLMs) and the prohibitive cost of training these models from scratch, dynamically forgetting specific knowledge e.g., private or proprietary, without retraining the model has become an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Tyler Lizzo , Larry Heck

In this paper, we investigate the safety mechanisms of instruction fine-tuned large language models (LLMs). We discover that re-weighting MLP neurons can significantly compromise a model's safety, especially for MLPs in end-of-sentence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Yifan Luo , Zhennan Zhou , Meitan Wang , Bin Dong

Large language model (LLM) unlearning has become a critical mechanism for removing undesired data, knowledge, or behaviors from pre-trained models while retaining their general utility. Yet, with the rise of open-weight LLMs, we ask: can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Bingqi Shang , Yiwei Chen , Yihua Zhang , Bingquan Shen , Sijia Liu

Representation learning has been widely studied in the context of meta-learning, enabling rapid learning of new tasks through shared representations. Recent works such as MAML have explored using fine-tuning-based metrics, which measure the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Kurtland Chua , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

Training and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) come with challenges related to memory and computational requirements due to the increasing size of the model weights and the optimizer states. Various techniques have been developed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Yehonathan Refael , Jonathan Svirsky , Boris Shustin , Wasim Huleihel , Ofir Lindenbaum

Language models can retain dangerous knowledge and skills even after extensive safety fine-tuning, posing both misuse and misalignment risks. Recent studies show that even specialized unlearning methods can be easily reversed. To address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Filip Sondej , Yushi Yang , Mikołaj Kniejski , Marcel Windys

Guardrails have emerged as an alternative to safety alignment for content moderation of large language models (LLMs). Existing model-based guardrails have not been designed for resource-constrained computational portable devices, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Hayder Elesedy , Pedro M. Esperança , Silviu Vlad Oprea , Mete Ozay

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in NLP tasks. Despite the great success, mainstream solutions largely follow the pre-training then finetuning paradigm, which brings in both high deployment costs and low…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Xiang Li , Xin Jiang , Xuying Meng , Aixin Sun , Yequan Wang

Instruction fine-tuning has recently emerged as a promising approach for improving the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on new tasks. This technique has shown particular strength in improving the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Jiuding Sun , Chantal Shaib , Byron C. Wallace

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have revolutionized vision-language understanding but remain vulnerable to multimodal jailbreak attacks, where adversarial inputs are meticulously crafted to elicit harmful or inappropriate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Sejoon Oh , Yiqiao Jin , Megha Sharma , Donghyun Kim , Eric Ma , Gaurav Verma , Srijan Kumar

Machine unlearning aims to remove sensitive or undesired data from large language models. However, recent studies suggest that unlearning is often shallow, claiming that removed knowledge can easily be recovered. In this work, we critically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Zhili Feng , Yixuan Even Xu , Alexander Robey , Robert Kirk , Xander Davies , Yarin Gal , Avi Schwarzschild , J. Zico Kolter

Instruction tuning is critical to improve LLMs but usually suffers from low-quality and redundant data. Data filtering for instruction tuning has proved important in improving both the efficiency and performance of the tuning process. But…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ming Li , Yong Zhang , Shwai He , Zhitao Li , Hongyu Zhao , Jianzong Wang , Ning Cheng , Tianyi Zhou

We present an efficient method of utilizing pretrained language models, where we learn selective binary masks for pretrained weights in lieu of modifying them through finetuning. Extensive evaluations of masking BERT and RoBERTa on a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Mengjie Zhao , Tao Lin , Fei Mi , Martin Jaggi , Hinrich Schütze

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements, drawing significant attention from the research community. Their capabilities are largely attributed to large-scale architectures, which require extensive…

We formulate the machine unlearning problem as a general constrained optimization problem. It unifies the first-order methods from the approximate machine unlearning literature. This paper then introduces the concept of feasible updates as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Virgile Dine , Teddy Furon , Charly Faure

Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) on web-scale datasets becomes fundamental for advancing general-purpose AI. In contrast, enhancing their predictive performance on downstream tasks typically involves adapting their knowledge…

When using large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes applications, we need to know when we can trust their predictions. Some works argue that prompting high-performance LLMs is sufficient to produce calibrated uncertainties, while others…

Guardrails are critical for the safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs)-powered software. Unlike traditional rule-based systems with limited, predefined input-output spaces that inherently constrain unsafe behavior, LLMs enable…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Rui Yang , Michael Fu , Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn , Chetan Arora , Gunel Gulmammadova , Joey Chua