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

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As the popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) grow, combining model safety with utility becomes increasingly important. The challenge is making sure that LLMs can recognize and decline dangerous prompts without sacrificing their ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Ruchira Ray , Ruchi Bhalani

As a relative quality comparison of model responses, human and Large Language Model (LLM) preferences serve as common alignment goals in model fine-tuning and criteria in evaluation. Yet, these preferences merely reflect broad tendencies,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Junlong Li , Fan Zhou , Shichao Sun , Yikai Zhang , Hai Zhao , Pengfei Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be susceptible to jailbreak attacks, or adversarial attacks used to illicit high risk behavior from a model. Jailbreaks have been exploited by cybercriminals and blackhat actors to cause…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Joao Fonseca , Andrew Bell , Julia Stoyanovich

Recent advances in alignment techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved the safety of large language models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Mengxuan Hu , Vivek V. Datla , Anoop Kumar , Zihan Guan , Sheng Li , Alfy Samuel , Daben Liu

Large language models (LLMs) trained on internet-scale corpora can exhibit systematic biases that increase the probability of unwanted behavior. In this study, we examined potential biases towards synthetic vs. biological technological…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Trent R Northen , Mingxun Wang

Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of large language models (LLMs). Yet, existing approaches often rely on heavyweight fine-tuning that is costly to update, audit, and maintain across model families. Full…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Sasha Behrouzi , Lichao Wu , Mohamadreza Rostami , Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

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

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

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

Studying the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to unsafe behaviors is an important topic of research today. Building safety classification models or guard models, which are fine-tuned models for input/output safety classification…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Sowmya Vajjala

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into educational applications. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak and fine-tuning attacks, which can compromise safety alignment and lead to harmful outputs. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Xin Yi , Yue Li , Dongsheng Shi , Linlin Wang , Xiaoling Wang , Liang He

Large Language Models' safety-aligned behaviors, such as refusing harmful queries, can be represented by linear directions in activation space. Previous research modeled safety behavior with a single direction, limiting mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Wenbo Pan , Zhichao Liu , Qiguang Chen , Xiangyang Zhou , Haining Yu , Xiaohua Jia

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but ensuring their safety and alignment with human values remains crucial. Current safety alignment methods, such as supervised fine-tuning and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Bilgehan Sel , Dingcheng Li , Phillip Wallis , Vaishakh Keshava , Ming Jin , Siddhartha Reddy Jonnalagadda

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on human preferences, typically through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has proven successful in enhancing their capabilities. However, ensuring the safety of LLMs during…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Wenxuan Zhang , Philip H. S. Torr , Mohamed Elhoseiny , Adel Bibi

Safety-critical task planning in robotic systems remains challenging: classical planners suffer from poor scalability, Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based methods generalize poorly, and base Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot guarantee…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Jialiang Fan , Weizhe Xu , Mengyu Liu , Oleg Sokolsky , Insup Lee , Fanxin Kong

This paper investigates the impact of model compression on the way Large Language Models (LLMs) process prompts, particularly concerning jailbreak resistance. We show that moderate WANDA pruning can enhance resistance to jailbreaking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Adib Hasan , Ileana Rugina , Alex Wang

AI-powered coding assistants such as GitHub's Copilot and OpenAI's ChatGPT have achieved notable success in automating code generation. However, these tools rely on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) that are typically trained on…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Junjie Li , Fazle Rabbi , Cheng Cheng , Aseem Sangalay , Yuan Tian , Jinqiu Yang

Large language models (LLMs) are used to generate content for a wide range of tasks, and are set to reach a growing audience in coming years due to integration in product interfaces like ChatGPT or search engines like Bing. This intensifies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Hannah Rose Kirk , Bertie Vidgen , Paul Röttger , Scott A. Hale

Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks unpredictably degrades safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content and developers have no adversarial intent. We show that the prevailing explanation, that…

Safety alignment is an important procedure before the official deployment of a Large Language Model (LLM). While safety alignment has been extensively studied for LLM, there is still a large research gap for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Zachary Yahn , Yichang Xu , Ling Liu