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Related papers: Guardrail Baselines for Unlearning in LLMs

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In this paper, we show it is possible to bypass the safety guardrails of large language models (LLMs) through a humorous prompt including the unsafe request. In particular, our method does not edit the unsafe request and follows a fixed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde

In recent years, unlearning techniques, which are methods for inducing a model to "forget" previously learned information, have attracted attention as a way to address privacy and copyright concerns in large language models (LLMs) and large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tatsuki Kawakami , Kazuki Egashira , Atsuyuki Miyai , Go Irie , Kiyoharu Aizawa

Recent prompt-based approaches allow pretrained language models to achieve strong performances on few-shot finetuning by reformulating downstream tasks as a language modeling problem. In this work, we demonstrate that, despite its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Prasetya Ajie Utama , Nafise Sadat Moosavi , Victor Sanh , Iryna Gurevych

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Yikun Wang , Rui Zheng , Liang Ding , Qi Zhang , Dahua Lin , Dacheng Tao

Unlearning the data observed during the training of a machine learning (ML) model is an important task that can play a pivotal role in fortifying the privacy and security of ML-based applications. This paper raises the following questions:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Ayush K Tarun , Vikram S Chundawat , Murari Mandal , Mohan Kankanhalli

Large visual language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated excellent instruction-following capabilities, yet remain vulnerable to stealthy backdoor attacks when finetuned using contaminated data. Existing backdoor defense techniques are usually…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Yuan Xun , Siyuan Liang , Xiaojun Jia , Xinwei Liu , Xiaochun Cao

The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zhiwen Ruan , Yun Chen , Yutao Hou , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Here, we show that current LLM unlearning methods inherently reduce models' robustness, causing them to misbehave even when a single non-adversarial forget-token is present in the retain-query. Toward understanding underlying causes, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Dang Huu-Tien , Hoang Thanh-Tung , Anh Bui , Minh-Phuong Nguyen , Le-Minh Nguyen , Naoya Inoue

The fine-tuning paradigm has emerged as a prominent approach for addressing long-tail learning tasks in the era of foundation models. However, the impact of fine-tuning strategies on long-tail learning performance remains unexplored. In…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Jiang-Xin Shi , Tong Wei , Yu-Feng Li

Background: Fine-tuning is central to adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but its reliance on training data, parameter updates, and reusable components opens entry points for attackers. Threats have…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenjuan Li , Yitao Liu , Runze Chen , Rajkumar Buyya

How is knowledge stored in an LLM's weights? We study this via layer pruning: if removing a certain layer does not affect model performance in common question-answering benchmarks, then the weights in that layer are not necessary for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Andrey Gromov , Kushal Tirumala , Hassan Shapourian , Paolo Glorioso , Daniel A. Roberts

LLM unlearning is essential for mitigating safety, copyright, and privacy concerns in pre-trained large language models (LLMs). Compared to preference alignment, it offers a more explicit way by removing undesirable knowledge characterized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Junfeng Liao , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Xin Yu , Ling Chen , Zhen Fang

Finetuning on narrow domains has become an essential tool to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks and to create models with known unusual properties that are useful for research. We show that narrow finetuning creates strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Julian Minder , Clément Dumas , Stewart Slocum , Helena Casademunt , Cameron Holmes , Robert West , Neel Nanda

The heightened emphasis on the regulation of deep generative models, propelled by escalating concerns pertaining to privacy and compliance with regulatory frameworks, underscores the imperative need for precise control mechanisms over these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Subhodip Panda , Prathosh AP

State-of-the-art generative models exhibit powerful image-generation capabilities, introducing various ethical and legal challenges to service providers hosting these models. Consequently, Content Removal Techniques (CRTs) have emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Piyush Nagasubramaniam , Neeraj Karamchandani , Chen Wu , Sencun Zhu

Effectively finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is critical for their success in downstream tasks. However, PLMs may have risks in overfitting the pretraining tasks and data, which usually have gap with the target downstream tasks.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

The security threat of backdoor attacks is a central concern for deep neural networks (DNNs). Recently, without poisoned data, unlearning models with clean data and then learning a pruning mask have contributed to backdoor defense.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Weilin Lin , Li Liu , Shaokui Wei , Jianze Li , Hui Xiong

Parameter-efficient methods are able to use a single frozen pre-trained large language model (LLM) to perform many tasks by learning task-specific soft prompts that modulate model behavior when concatenated to the input text. However, these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-12 Brian Lester , Joshua Yurtsever , Siamak Shakeri , Noah Constant

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in diverse tasks, yet their safety alignment remains fragile during adaptation. Even when fine-tuning on benign data or with low-rank adaptation, pre-trained safety behaviors are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Bingjie Zhang , Yibo Yang , Zhe Ren , Dandan Guo , Jindong Gu , Philip Torr , Bernard Ghanem

Visual and textual soft prompt tuning can effectively improve the adaptability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning on video tasks impairs the model's generalization ability to unseen classes. Existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Bin Wang , Ruotong Hu , Wentong Li , Wenqian Wang , Mingliang Gao , Runmin Cong , Wei Zhang , Xudong Jiang