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Related papers: Guardrail Baselines for Unlearning in LLMs

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Fine-tuning significantly improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper aims to provide an in-depth interpretation of the fine-tuning process through circuit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Xu Wang , Yan Hu , Wenyu Du , Reynold Cheng , Benyou Wang , Difan Zou

Fine-tuning is a crucial paradigm for adapting pre-trained large language models to downstream tasks. Recently, methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) have been shown to effectively fine-tune LLMs with an extreme reduction in trainable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Reece Shuttleworth , Jacob Andreas , Antonio Torralba , Pratyusha Sharma

Existing fine-tuning methods use a single learning rate over all layers. In this paper, first, we discuss that trends of layer-wise weight variations by fine-tuning using a single learning rate do not match the well-known notion that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Youngmin Ro , Jin Young Choi

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning is crucial to aligning large language models (LLMs), but the process is notoriously unstable and exhibits high variance across model checkpoints. In practice, selecting the best checkpoint is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Manh Nguyen , Dung Nguyen , Dai Do , Svetha Venkatesh , Hung Le

Fine-tuning is arguably the most straightforward way to tailor a pre-trained model (e.g., a foundation model) to downstream applications, but it also comes with the risk of losing valuable knowledge the model had learned in pre-training.…

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising avenue for machine translation (MT). However, current LLM-based MT systems are brittle: their effectiveness highly depends on the choice of few-shot examples and they often require extra…

As LLMs increasingly impact safety-critical applications, ensuring their safety using guardrails remains a key challenge. This paper proposes GuardReasoner, a new safeguard for LLMs, by guiding the guard model to learn to reason.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Yue Liu , Hongcheng Gao , Shengfang Zhai , Yufei He , Jun Xia , Zhengyu Hu , Yulin Chen , Xihong Yang , Jiaheng Zhang , Stan Z. Li , Hui Xiong , Bryan Hooi

Mitigating the retention of sensitive or private information in large language models is essential for enhancing privacy and safety. Existing unlearning methods, like Gradient Ascent and Negative Preference Optimization, directly tune…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yijiang River Dong , Hongzhou Lin , Mikhail Belkin , Ramon Huerta , Ivan Vulić

Mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their reliable deployment. Existing methods typically fine-tune LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge scope. However, these methods often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Hao An , Yang Xu

Large language models inevitably retain sensitive information, defined as inputs that may induce harmful generations, due to training on massive web corpora, raising concerns for privacy and safety. Existing machine unlearning methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yujie Lin , Chengyi Yang , Zhishang Xiang , Yiping Song , Jinsong Su

Machine unlearning, the study of efficiently removing the impact of specific training instances on a model, has garnered increased attention in recent years due to regulatory guidelines such as the \emph{Right to be Forgotten}. Achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Martin Pawelczyk , Seth Neel , Himabindu Lakkaraju

The significant advancements in large language models (LLMs) give rise to a promising research direction, i.e., leveraging LLMs as recommenders (LLMRec). The efficacy of LLMRec arises from the open-world knowledge and reasoning capabilities…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Hangyu Wang , Jianghao Lin , Bo Chen , Yang Yang , Ruiming Tang , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

The fine-tuning paradigm in addressing long-tail learning tasks has sparked significant interest since the emergence of foundation models. Nonetheless, how fine-tuning impacts performance in long-tail learning was not explicitly quantified.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jiang-Xin Shi , Tong Wei , Zhi Zhou , Jie-Jing Shao , Xin-Yan Han , Yu-Feng Li

We introduce a lightweight yet highly effective safety guardrail framework for language models, demonstrating that small-scale language models can achieve, and even surpass, the performance of larger counterparts in content moderation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Aleksei Ilin , Gor Matevosyan , Xueying Ma , Vladimir Eremin , Suhaa Dada , Muqun Li , Riyaaz Shaik , Haluk Noyan Tokgozoglu

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but also present risks such as biased content generation and privacy issues. One of the current alignment techniques includes principle-driven integration, but it faces challenges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yi Luo , Zhenghao Lin , Yuhao Zhang , Jiashuo Sun , Chen Lin , Chengjin Xu , Xiangdong Su , Yelong Shen , Jian Guo , Yeyun Gong

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for answering user queries, yet they remain highly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing guardrail methods typically rely on internal features or textual responses to detect malicious…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zikai Zhang , Rui Hu , Olivera Kotevska , Jiahao Xu

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is a popular class of techniques that strive to adapt large models in a scalable and resource-efficient manner. Yet, the mechanisms underlying their training performance and generalization remain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zahra Rahimi Afzal , Tara Esmaeilbeig , Mojtaba Soltanalian , Mesrob I. Ohannessian

Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive…

Large language models (LLMs) can internalize private or harmful content, motivating unlearning that removes a forget set while preserving retaining knowledge. However, forgetting updates often cause collateral degradation on retaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Duo Zhou , Yuji Zhang , Tianxin Wei , Ruizhong Qiu , Ke Yang , Xiao Lin , Cheng Qian , Jingrui He , Hanghang Tong , Chengxiang Zhai , Heng Ji , Huan Zhang

Machine unlearning has emerged as a critical capability for addressing privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns in large language models (LLMs). Existing methods operate at the sequence level, applying uniform updates across all tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Jiawei Wu , Doudou Zhou