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Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked widespread concerns about their safety. Recent work demonstrates that safety alignment of LLMs can be easily removed by fine-tuning with a few adversarially chosen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Samuele Poppi , Zheng-Xin Yong , Yifei He , Bobbie Chern , Han Zhao , Aobo Yang , Jianfeng Chi

Current Large Language Models (LLMs), even those tuned for safety and alignment, are susceptible to jailbreaking. Some have found that just further fine-tuning an aligned model with benign data (i.e., data without harmful content)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Luxi He , Mengzhou Xia , Peter Henderson

As large language models (LLMs) become more powerful and are deployed more autonomously, it will be increasingly important to prevent them from causing harmful outcomes. Researchers have investigated a variety of safety techniques for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Ryan Greenblatt , Buck Shlegeris , Kshitij Sachan , Fabien Roger

We identify a novel phenomenon in language models: benign fine-tuning of frontier models can lead to privacy collapse. We find that diverse, subtle patterns in training data can degrade contextual privacy, including optimisation for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Anmol Goel , Cornelius Emde , Sangdoo Yun , Seong Joon Oh , Martin Gubri

Fine-tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to specific domains, but often compromises their previously established safety alignment. To mitigate the degradation of model safety during fine-tuning, we introduce LookAhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Kangwei Liu , Mengru Wang , Yujie Luo , Lin Yuan , Mengshu Sun , Lei Liang , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou , Bryan Hooi , Shumin Deng

Current vision large language models (VLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities yet are prone to generate harmful content and are vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. Our initial analysis finds that this is due to the presence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yongshuo Zong , Ondrej Bohdal , Tingyang Yu , Yongxin Yang , Timothy Hospedales

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yanbo Wang , Jiyang Guan , Jian Liang , Ran He

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

Model providers increasingly release open weights or allow users to fine-tune foundation models through APIs. Although these models are safety-aligned before release, their safeguards can often be removed by fine-tuning on harmful data.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Itay Zloczower , Eyal Lenga , Gilad Gressel , Yisroel Mirsky

Harmful fine-tuning attack introduces significant security risks to the fine-tuning services. Main-stream defenses aim to vaccinate the model such that the later harmful fine-tuning attack is less effective. However, our evaluation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Yibo Wang , Tiansheng Huang , Li Shen , Huanjin Yao , Haotian Luo , Rui Liu , Naiqiang Tan , Jiaxing Huang , Dacheng Tao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often trained with safety guards intended to prevent harmful text generation. However, such safety training can be removed by fine-tuning the LLM on harmful datasets. While this emerging threat (harmful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Domenic Rosati , Jan Wehner , Kai Williams , Łukasz Bartoszcze , Jan Batzner , Hassan Sajjad , Frank Rudzicz

Recent large language models (LLMs) have increasingly adopted the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture for efficiency. MoE-based LLMs heavily depend on a superficial safety mechanism in which harmful inputs are routed safety-critical…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Jaehan Kim , Minkyoo Song , Seungwon Shin , Sooel Son

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have manifested significant advancements. To facilitate safeguards against malicious exploitation, a body of research has concentrated on aligning LLMs with human preferences and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Yuanpu Cao , Bochuan Cao , Jinghui Chen

Language model attacks typically assume one of two extreme threat models: full white-box access to model weights, or black-box access limited to a text generation API. However, real-world APIs are often more flexible than just text…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Kellin Pelrine , Mohammad Taufeeque , Michał Zając , Euan McLean , Adam Gleave

Advancements in open-sourced text-to-image models and fine-tuning methods have led to the increasing risk of malicious adaptation, i.e., fine-tuning to generate harmful/unauthorized content. Recent works, e.g., Glaze or MIST, have developed…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Amber Yijia Zheng , Raymond A. Yeh

The demand of customized large language models (LLMs) has led to commercial LLMs offering black-box fine-tuning APIs, yet this convenience introduces a critical security loophole: attackers could jailbreak the LLMs by fine-tuning them with…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zhixin Xie , Xurui Song , Jun Luo

Aligned LLMs are secure, capable of recognizing and refusing to answer malicious questions. However, the role of internal parameters in maintaining such security is not well understood yet, further these models can be vulnerable to security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Shen Li , Liuyi Yao , Lan Zhang , Yaliang Li

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a popular tool as they have significantly advanced in their capability to tackle a wide range of language-based tasks. However, LLMs applications are highly vulnerable to prompt injection attacks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Md Abdur Rahman , Fan Wu , Alfredo Cuzzocrea , Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

Instruction tuning has proven effective in enhancing Large Language Models' (LLMs) performance on downstream tasks. However, real-world fine-tuning faces inherent conflicts between model providers' intellectual property protection, clients'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Haonan Shi , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

While large language models (LLMs) such as Llama-2 or GPT-4 have shown impressive zero-shot performance, fine-tuning is still necessary to enhance their performance for customized datasets, domain-specific tasks, or other private needs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Chia-Yi Hsu , Yu-Lin Tsai , Chih-Hsun Lin , Pin-Yu Chen , Chia-Mu Yu , Chun-Ying Huang