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Related papers: What Makes and Breaks Safety Fine-tuning? A Mechan…

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As large language models attract increasing attention and find widespread application, concurrent challenges of reliability also arise at the same time. Confidence calibration, an effective analysis method for gauging the reliability of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Chiwei Zhu , Benfeng Xu , Quan Wang , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have extended the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling audio-based human interactions. However, recent research has revealed that LALMs remain vulnerable to harmful queries due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Hao Yang , Lizhen Qu , Ehsan Shareghi , Gholamreza Haffari

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Nirmalendu Prakash , Yeo Wei Jie , Amir Abdullah , Ranjan Satapathy , Erik Cambria , Roy Ka Wei Lee

Considerable research efforts have been devoted to ensuring that large language models (LLMs) align with human values and generate safe text. However, an excessive focus on sensitivity to certain topics can compromise the model's robustness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Huachuan Qiu , Shuai Zhang , Anqi Li , Hongliang He , Zhenzhong Lan

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, but their inherent safety risks - ranging from harmful content generation to broader societal harms - pose significant challenges. These risks can be amplified by the recent…

Recent research shows that fine-tuning on benign instruction-following data can inadvertently undo the safety alignment process and increase a model's propensity to comply with harmful queries. While instruction-following fine-tuning is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Francisco Eiras , Aleksandar Petrov , Philip H. S. Torr , M. Pawan Kumar , Adel Bibi

Context: In the fast-paced evolution of software development, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable tools for tasks such as code generation, completion, analysis, and bug fixing. Ensuring the robustness of these models…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yang Liu , Armstrong Foundjem , Xingfang Wu , Heng Li , Foutse Khomh

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to control robotic systems such as drones, but their risks of causing physical threats and harm in real-world applications remain unexplored. Our study addresses the critical gap in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yung-Chen Tang , Pin-Yu Chen , Tsung-Yi Ho

One of the key technologies for the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) is preference alignment. However, a notable side effect of preference alignment is poor calibration: while the pre-trained models are typically well-calibrated,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jiancong Xiao , Bojian Hou , Zhanliang Wang , Ruochen Jin , Qi Long , Weijie J. Su , Li Shen

Open-weight large language models (LLMs) unlock huge benefits in innovation, personalization, privacy, and democratization. However, their core advantage - modifiability - opens the door to systemic risks: bad actors can trivially subvert…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Ann-Kathrin Dombrowski , Dillon Bowen , Adam Gleave , Chris Cundy

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as text generation and translation, among others. However, these models often generate texts that can perpetuate biases. Existing approaches to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Shaina Raza , Oluwanifemi Bamgbose , Shardul Ghuge , Fatemeh Tavakol , Deepak John Reji , Syed Raza Bashir

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

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 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

Despite substantial efforts in safety alignment, recent research indicates that Large Language Models (LLMs) remain highly susceptible to jailbreak attacks. Among these attacks, finetuning-based ones that compromise LLMs' safety alignment…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Zhixin Xie , Xurui Song , Jun Luo

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent an advanced evolution of earlier, simpler language models. They boast enhanced abilities to handle complex language patterns and generate coherent text, images, audios, and videos. Furthermore, they…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Jun Huang , Jiawei Zhang , Qi Wang , Weihong Han , Yanchun Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse natural language processing tasks, but their growing power also amplifies potential risks such as jailbreak attacks that circumvent built-in safety mechanisms.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Qinjian Zhao , Jiaqi Wang , Zhiqiang Gao , Zhihao Dou , Belal Abuhaija , Kaizhu Huang

Recent AI agents, such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, primarily rely on instruction tuning and reinforcement learning to calibrate the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring the outputs are harmless and helpful.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Jingxin Xu , Guoshun Nan , Sheng Guan , Sicong Leng , Yilian Liu , Zixiao Wang , Yuyang Ma , Zhili Zhou , Yanzhao Hou , Xiaofeng Tao

Deploying language models (LMs) in customer-facing speech applications requires conversational fluency and adherence to specific stylistic guidelines. This can be challenging to achieve reliably using complex system prompts due to issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ingo Marquardt , Philippe Brule