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Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a common practice for tailoring models to individual needs and preferences. The choice of datasets for fine-tuning can be diverse, introducing safety concerns regarding the potential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Hyeong Kyu Choi , Xuefeng Du , Yixuan Li

Leading language model (LM) providers like OpenAI and Anthropic allow customers to fine-tune frontier LMs for specific use cases. To prevent abuse, these providers apply filters to block fine-tuning on overtly harmful data. In this setting,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Joshua Kazdan , Abhay Puri , Rylan Schaeffer , Lisa Yu , Chris Cundy , Jason Stanley , Sanmi Koyejo , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, but their ability to generate harmful content raises serious safety concerns. Although safety alignment techniques are often applied during pre-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Chengcan Wu , Zhixin Zhang , Zeming Wei , Yihao Zhang , Xiaokun Luan , Meng Sun

Recent research on large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to understand and employ deceptive behavior, even without explicit prompting. However, such behavior has only been observed in rare, specialized cases and has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Laurène Vaugrante , Francesca Carlon , Maluna Menke , Thilo Hagendorff

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success and are widely adopted for diverse applications. However, fine-tuning these models often involves private or sensitive information, raising critical privacy concerns. In this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Kaiyuan Zhang , Siyuan Cheng , Hanxi Guo , Yuetian Chen , Zian Su , Shengwei An , Yuntao Du , Charles Fleming , Ashish Kundu , Xiangyu Zhang , Ninghui Li

Adversaries may look to steal or attack black-box NLP systems, either for financial gain or to exploit model errors. One setting of particular interest is machine translation (MT), where models have high commercial value and errors can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Eric Wallace , Mitchell Stern , Dawn Song

Recent studies have uncovered a troubling vulnerability in the fine-tuning stage of large language models (LLMs): even fine-tuning on entirely benign datasets can lead to a significant increase in the harmfulness of LLM outputs. Building on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zihan Guan , Mengxuan Hu , Ronghang Zhu , Sheng Li , Anil Vullikanti

LLM developers have imposed technical interventions to prevent fine-tuning misuse attacks, attacks where adversaries evade safeguards by fine-tuning the model using a public API. Previous work has established several successful attacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xander Davies , Eric Winsor , Alexandra Souly , Tomek Korbak , Robert Kirk , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Yarin Gal

Backdoor attacks can implant malicious behaviours into deep models while preserving performance on clean data, posing a serious threat to safety-critical vision systems. Although backdoor mitigation has been studied extensively for image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Kealan Dunnett , Reza Arablouei , Dimity Miller , Volkan Dedeoglu , Raja Jurdak

Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on custom…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Xiangyu Qi , Yi Zeng , Tinghao Xie , Pin-Yu Chen , Ruoxi Jia , Prateek Mittal , Peter Henderson

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks emerges as a primary concern. While fine-tuning models on domain-specific datasets is often employed to improve model performance, it can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Punya Syon Pandey , Samuel Simko , Kellin Pelrine , Zhijing Jin

Finetuning pretrained large language models (LLMs) has become the standard paradigm for developing downstream applications. However, its security implications remain unclear, particularly regarding whether finetuned LLMs inherit jailbreak…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yixin Tan , Zhe Yu , Jun Sakuma

As LLMs develop increasingly advanced capabilities, there is an increased need to minimize the harm that could be caused to society by certain model outputs; hence, most LLMs have safety guardrails added, for example via fine-tuning. In…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-22 David Williams-King , Linh Le , Adam Oberman , Yoshua Bengio

LLMs(Large Language Models) nowadays have widespread adoption as a tool for solving issues across various domain/tasks. These models since are susceptible to produce harmful or toxic results, inference-time adversarial attacks, therefore…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Sachin Kumar

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications ranging from chatbots to agentic systems, where they are expected to process untrusted data and follow trusted instructions. Failure to distinguish between…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Xiaoxue Yang , Bozhidar Stevanoski , Matthieu Meeus , Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

Machine learning based intrusion detection systems are increasingly targeted by black box adversarial attacks, where attackers craft evasive inputs using indirect feedback such as binary outputs or behavioral signals like response time and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Sabrine Ennaji , Elhadj Benkhelifa , Luigi Vincenzo Mancini

The inherent risk of generating harmful and unsafe content by Large Language Models (LLMs), has highlighted the need for their safety alignment. Various techniques like supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Kalyan Nakka , Nitesh Saxena

Fine-tuning-as-a-service, while commercially successful for Large Language Model (LLM) providers, exposes models to harmful fine-tuning attacks. As a widely explored defense paradigm against such attacks, unlearning attempts to remove…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Biao Yi , Tiansheng Huang , Baolei Zhang , Tong Li , Lihai Nie , Zheli Liu , Li Shen

The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and the widespread usage of MLLM cloud services such as GPT-4V raised great concerns about privacy leakage in visual data. As these models are typically deployed in cloud services,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Xiaofei Hui , Qian Wu , Haoxuan Qu , Majid Mirmehdi , Hossein Rahmani , Jun Liu

Despite the general capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM), these models still request fine-tuning or adaptation with customized data when meeting specific business demands. However, this process inevitably introduces new threats,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Jiongxiao Wang , Jiazhao Li , Yiquan Li , Xiangyu Qi , Junjie Hu , Yixuan Li , Patrick McDaniel , Muhao Chen , Bo Li , Chaowei Xiao