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Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhenhong Zhou , Haiyang Yu , Xinghua Zhang , Rongwu Xu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks - resulting in harmful, unethical, or biased text generations. However, existing jailbreaking methods are computationally costly. In this paper, we propose the weak-to-strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Xuandong Zhao , Xianjun Yang , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Lei Li , Yu-Xiang Wang , William Yang Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are swiftly advancing in architecture and capability, and as they integrate more deeply into complex systems, the urgency to scrutinize their security properties grows. This paper surveys research in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Erfan Shayegani , Md Abdullah Al Mamun , Yu Fu , Pedram Zaree , Yue Dong , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

Large Language Models (LLMs) with safe-alignment training are powerful instruments with robust language comprehension capabilities. These models typically undergo meticulous alignment procedures involving human feedback to ensure the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Maithili Joshi , Palash Nandi , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Safety alignment is crucial to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave in ways that align with human preferences and prevent harmful actions during inference. However, recent studies show that the alignment can be easily compromised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 ShengYun Peng , Pin-Yu Chen , Matthew Hull , Duen Horng Chau

In this paper, we argue that current safety alignment research efforts for large language models are hindered by many intertwined sources of noise, such as small datasets, methodological inconsistencies, and unreliable evaluation setups.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tim Beyer , Sophie Xhonneux , Simon Geisler , Gauthier Gidel , Leo Schwinn , Stephan Günnemann

The emergence of autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents capable of tool usage has introduced new safety risks that go beyond traditional conversational misuse. These agents, empowered to execute external functions, are vulnerable to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Zeyang Sha , Hanling Tian , Zhuoer Xu , Shiwen Cui , Changhua Meng , Weiqiang Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong but shallow alignment: they directly refuse harmful queries when a refusal is expected at the very start of an assistant turn, yet this protection collapses once a harmful continuation is underway…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jiawei Zhang , Andrew Estornell , David D. Baek , Bo Li , Xiaojun Xu

Current safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) face two key challenges: (1) under-generalization, which leaves models vulnerable to novel jailbreak attacks, and (2) over-alignment, which leads to the excessive refusal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yutao Mou , Yuxiao Luo , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on code with security vulnerabilities can result in misaligned and unsafe behaviors across broad domains. These results prompted concerns about the emergence of harmful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jeremiah Giordani

Why is safety alignment in LLMs shallow? We prove that gradient-based alignment inherently concentrates on positions where harm is decided and vanishes beyond. Using a martingale decomposition of sequence-level harm, we derive an exact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Robin Young

Small language models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed on edge devices, making their safety alignment crucial yet challenging. Current shallow alignment methods that rely on direct refusal of malicious queries fail to provide robust…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Haonan Shi , Guoli Wang , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is a common practice to adapt generalist models to specialized domains. However, recent studies show that fine-tuning can erode safety alignment, causing LLMs to respond to harmful or unethical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Aladin Djuhera , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Farhan Ahmed , Syed Zawad , Holger Boche

Fine-tuning is an essential and pervasive functionality for applying large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, it has the potential to substantially degrade safety alignment, e.g., by greatly increasing susceptibility to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Jiawen Zhang , Yangfan Hu , Kejia Chen , Lipeng He , Jiachen Ma , Jian Lou , Dan Li , Jian Liu , Xiaohu Yang , Ruoxi Jia

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs are typically safety-aligned before release to prevent harmful content generation. However, recent studies show that safety behaviors are concentrated in a small subset of parameters, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Zhaoxin Wang , Jiaming Liang , Fengbin Zhu , Weixiang Zhao , Junfeng Fang , Jiayi Ji , Handing Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Fine-tuning well-aligned large language models (LLMs) on new domains often degrades their safety alignment, even when using benign datasets. Existing safety alignment techniques primarily focus on pretraining, leaving fine-tuned models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Thong Bach , Truyen Tran

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on some task-specific datasets has been a primary use of LLMs. However, it has been empirically observed that this approach to enhancing capability inevitably compromises safety, a phenomenon also…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-28 Pin-Yu Chen , Han Shen , Payel Das , Tianyi Chen

Large language models are aligned to be safe, preventing users from generating harmful content like misinformation or instructions for illegal activities. However, previous work has shown that the alignment process is vulnerable to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Javier Rando , Francesco Croce , Kryštof Mitka , Stepan Shabalin , Maksym Andriushchenko , Nicolas Flammarion , Florian Tramèr

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across natural language tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Despite extensive safety alignment efforts, recent studies show that such alignment is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yinzhi Zhao , Ming Wang , Shi Feng , Xiaocui Yang , Daling Wang , Yifei Zhang

Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) with safety alignment can be jail-broken by fine-tuning on a dataset mixed with harmful data. First time in the literature, we show that the jail-broken effect can be mitigated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu