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Understanding and addressing potential safety alignment risks in large language models (LLMs) is critical for ensuring their safe and trustworthy deployment. In this paper, we highlight an insidious safety threat: a compromised LLM can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Guangnian Wan , Xinyin Ma , Gongfan Fang , Xinchao Wang

Recent research demonstrates that the nascent fine-tuning-as-a-service business model exposes serious safety concerns: fine-tuning with a few harmful data uploaded from the users can compromise the safety alignment of the model. The attack,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu

Fine-tuning has emerged as a critical process in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific downstream tasks, enabling these models to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various domains. However, the fine-tuning process…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Hao Du , Shang Liu , Lele Zheng , Yang Cao , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Lei Chen

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), ensuring their safe use becomes increasingly critical. Fine-tuning is a widely used method for adapting models to downstream tasks, yet it is vulnerable to jailbreak attacks.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Xiangfang Li , Yu Wang , Bo Li

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

It is commonplace to produce application-specific models by fine-tuning large pre-trained models using a small bespoke dataset. The widespread availability of foundation model checkpoints on the web poses considerable risks, including the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yuxin Wen , Leo Marchyok , Sanghyun Hong , Jonas Geiping , Tom Goldstein , Nicholas Carlini

Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kathleen C. Fraser , Hillary Dawkins , Isar Nejadgholi , Svetlana Kiritchenko

We present a novel approach for attacking black-box large language models (LLMs) by exploiting their ability to express confidence in natural language. Existing black-box attacks require either access to continuous model outputs like logits…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jie Zhang , Meng Ding , Yang Liu , Jue Hong , Florian Tramèr

Large language models play a crucial role in modern natural language processing technologies. However, their extensive use also introduces potential security risks, such as the possibility of black-box attacks. These attacks can embed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Daniil Khomsky , Narek Maloyan , Bulat Nutfullin

Large Language Model (LLM) providers expose fine-tuning APIs that let end users fine-tune their frontier LLMs. Unfortunately, it has been shown that an adversary with fine-tuning access to an LLM can bypass safeguards. Particularly…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Sarah Egler , John Schulman , Nicholas Carlini

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

The pretraining and fine-tuning approach has become the leading technique for various NLP applications. However, recent studies reveal that fine-tuning data, due to their sensitive nature, domain-specific characteristics, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Qian Sun , Hanpeng Wu , Xi Sheryl Zhang

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) often employ safety alignment methods to resist harmful instructions. However, recent research shows that maliciously fine-tuning these LLMs on harmful data can easily bypass these safeguards. To…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Zixuan Chen , Weikai Lu , Xin Lin , Ziqian Zeng

Fine-tuning on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) with proprietary data is now a standard practice for downstream developers to obtain task-specific LLMs. Surprisingly, we reveal a new and concerning risk along with the practice: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhexin Zhang , Yuhao Sun , Junxiao Yang , Shiyao Cui , Yuanchao Zhang , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

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

Releasing open-source large language models (LLMs) presents a dual-use risk since bad actors can easily fine-tune these models for harmful purposes. Even without the open release of weights, weight stealing and fine-tuning APIs make closed…

Fine-tuning-as-a-service introduces a threat to Large Language Models' safety when service providers fine-tune their models on poisoned user-submitted datasets, a process known as harmful fine-tuning attacks. In this work, we show that by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Quoc Minh Nguyen , Trung Le , Jing Wu , Anh Tuan Bui , Mehrtash Harandi

Large language model (LLM) safety is a critical issue, with numerous studies employing red team testing to enhance model security. Among these, jailbreak methods explore potential vulnerabilities by crafting malicious prompts that induce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Honglin Mu , Han He , Yuxin Zhou , Yunlong Feng , Yang Xu , Libo Qin , Xiaoming Shi , Zeming Liu , Xudong Han , Qi Shi , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

The emergence of foundational models has greatly improved performance across various downstream tasks, with fine-tuning often yielding even better results. However, existing fine-tuning approaches typically require access to model weights…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Matan Levy , Rami Ben-Ari , Dvir Samuel , Nir Darshan , Dani Lischinski

Large Language Models (LLMs), which bridge the gap between human language understanding and complex problem-solving, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot settings. Despite the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Shuai Zhao , Meihuizi Jia , Zhongliang Guo , Leilei Gan , Xiaoyu Xu , Xiaobao Wu , Jie Fu , Yichao Feng , Fengjun Pan , Luu Anh Tuan
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