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Related papers: Safety Layers in Aligned Large Language Models: Th…

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The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Rui Zhang , Hongwei Li , Yun Shen , Xinyue Shen , Wenbo Jiang , Guowen Xu , Yang Liu , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable in real-world applications. However, their widespread adoption raises significant safety concerns, particularly in responding to socially harmful questions. Despite substantial efforts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Gabriel J. Perin , Runjin Chen , Xuxi Chen , Nina S. T. Hirata , Zhangyang Wang , Junyuan Hong

Fine-tuning-as-a-Service introduces a critical vulnerability where a few malicious examples mixed into the user's fine-tuning dataset can compromise the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While a recognized paradigm frames…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Biao Yi , Jiahao Li , Baolei Zhang , Lihai Nie , Tong Li , Tiansheng Huang , Zheli Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities that render them valuable in different applications, including conversational AI products. It is paramount to ensure the security and reliability of these products by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Melissa Kazemi Rad , Huy Nghiem , Andy Luo , Sahil Wadhwa , Mohammad Sorower , Stephen Rawls

The existing safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is found fragile and could be easily attacked through different strategies, such as through fine-tuning on a few harmful examples or manipulating the prefix of the generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Chak Tou Leong , Yi Cheng , Kaishuai Xu , Jian Wang , Hanlin Wang , Wenjie Li

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential as general-purpose AI assistants across various domains. To fully leverage this potential in specific applications, many companies provide fine-tuning API services, enabling users to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Ning Lu , Shengcai Liu , Jiahao Wu , Weiyu Chen , Zhirui Zhang , Yew-Soon Ong , Qi Wang , Ke Tang

Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhenhong Zhou , Haiyang Yu , Xinghua Zhang , Rongwu Xu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

The application scope of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to expand, leading to increasing interest in personalized LLMs that align with human values. However, aligning these models with individual values raises significant safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Sooyung Choi , Jaehyeok Lee , Xiaoyuan Yi , Jing Yao , Xing Xie , JinYeong Bak

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant advancements in performance, various jailbreak attacks have posed growing safety and ethical risks. Malicious users often exploit adversarial context to deceive LLMs, prompting them…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Jinhwa Kim , Ian G. Harris

Large language models (LLMs) employ safety mechanisms to prevent harmful outputs, yet these defenses primarily rely on semantic pattern matching. We show that encoding harmful prompts as coherent mathematical problems -- using formalisms…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Haoyu Zhang , Mohammad Zandsalimy , Shanu Sushmita

Log Anomaly Detection (LAD) seeks to identify atypical patterns in log data that are crucial to assessing the security and condition of systems. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in various fields, the use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Ying Fu Lim , Jiawen Zhu , Guansong Pang

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) has been gaining increasing attention. However, current safety-aligned LLMs suffer from the fragile and imbalanced safety mechanisms, which can still be induced to generate unsafe responses,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Weixiang Zhao , Yulin Hu , Zhuojun Li , Yang Deng , Jiahe Guo , Xingyu Sui , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vulnerable to adversarial misuse. While prior work has shown that safety-relevant features are encoded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sadia Asif , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

Instruction fine-tuning has emerged as a critical technique for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific applications. However, recent studies have highlighted significant security vulnerabilities in fine-tuned LLMs. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Jiawei Cao , Ming Ma , Danyang Zhao , Shuren Qi , Fenglei Fan , Ting Liu , Bing Qin

Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language, and reader discretion is recommended. The increasing open release of powerful large language models (LLMs) has facilitated the development of downstream applications by reducing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Xianjun Yang , Xiao Wang , Qi Zhang , Linda Petzold , William Yang Wang , Xun Zhao , Dahua Lin

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

Federated learning (FL) addresses privacy and data-silo issues in the training of large language models (LLMs). Most prior work focuses on improving the efficiency of federated learning for LLMs (FedLLM). However, security in open federated…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mingxiang Tao , Yu Tian , Wenxuan Tu , Yue Yang , Xue Yang , Xiangyan Tang

Despite the intrinsic risk-awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs), current defenses often result in shallow safety alignment, rendering models vulnerable to disguised attacks (e.g., prefilling) while degrading utility. To bridge this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Xianya Fang , Xianying Luo , Yadong Wang , Xiang Chen , Yu Tian , Zequn Sun , Rui Liu , Jun Fang , Naiqiang Tan , Yuanning Cui , Sheng-Jun Huang

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

The safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains vulnerable to Harmful Fine-tuning (HFT). While existing defenses impose constraints on parameters, gradients, or internal representations, we observe that they can be effectively…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Guoxin Lu , Letian Sha , Qing Wang , Peijie Sun , Hao Zhou , Hua Dai , Fu Xiao