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Related papers: Harmful Fine-tuning Attacks and Defenses for Large…

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Fine-tuning-as-a-service introduces a threat to Large Language Models' safety when service providers fine-tune their models on poisoned user-submitted datasets, a process known as harmful fine-tuning attacks. In this work, we show that by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Quoc Minh Nguyen , Trung Le , Jing Wu , Anh Tuan Bui , Mehrtash Harandi

Background: Fine-tuning is central to adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but its reliance on training data, parameter updates, and reusable components opens entry points for attackers. Threats have…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenjuan Li , Yitao Liu , Runze Chen , Rajkumar Buyya

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

Fine-tuning has emerged as a critical process in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific downstream tasks, enabling these models to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various domains. However, the fine-tuning process…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Hao Du , Shang Liu , Lele Zheng , Yang Cao , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Lei Chen

Safety aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks -- a few harmful data mixed in the fine-tuning dataset can break the LLMs's safety alignment. While several defenses have been proposed, our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Tiansheng Huang , Gautam Bhattacharya , Pratik Joshi , Josh Kimball , Ling Liu

Black-box finetuning is an emerging interface for adapting state-of-the-art language models to user needs. However, such access may also let malicious actors undermine model safety. To demonstrate the challenge of defending finetuning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Danny Halawi , Alexander Wei , Eric Wallace , Tony T. Wang , Nika Haghtalab , Jacob Steinhardt

Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kathleen C. Fraser , Hillary Dawkins , Isar Nejadgholi , Svetlana Kiritchenko

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

Harmful fine-tuning attacks pose a major threat to the security of large language models (LLMs), allowing adversaries to compromise safety guardrails with minimal harmful data. While existing defenses attempt to reinforce LLM alignment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yuhui Wang , Rongyi Zhu , Ting Wang

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), which bridge the gap between human language understanding and complex problem-solving, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot settings. Despite the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Shuai Zhao , Meihuizi Jia , Zhongliang Guo , Leilei Gan , Xiaoyu Xu , Xiaobao Wu , Jie Fu , Yichao Feng , Fengjun Pan , Luu Anh Tuan

This paper documents early research conducted in 2022 on defending against prompt injection attacks in large language models, providing historical context for the evolution of this critical security domain. This research focuses on two…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Gustavo Sandoval , Denys Fenchenko , Junyao Chen

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

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

Harmful fine-tuning attack poses serious safety concerns for large language models' fine-tuning-as-a-service. While existing defenses have been proposed to mitigate the issue, their performances are still far away from satisfactory, and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu

Harmful fine-tuning can invalidate safety alignment of large language models, exposing significant safety risks. In this paper, we utilize the attention sink mechanism to mitigate harmful fine-tuning. Specifically, we first measure a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Guozhi Liu , Weiwei Lin , Tiansheng Huang , Ruichao Mo , Qi Mu , Xiumin Wang , Li Shen

Backdoor data poisoning, inserted within instruction examples used to fine-tune a foundation Large Language Model (LLM) for downstream tasks (\textit{e.g.,} sentiment prediction), is a serious security concern due to the evasive nature of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Jayaram Raghuram , George Kesidis , David J. Miller

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

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

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) often employ safety alignment methods to resist harmful instructions. However, recent research shows that maliciously fine-tuning these LLMs on harmful data can easily bypass these safeguards. To…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Zixuan Chen , Weikai Lu , Xin Lin , Ziqian Zeng
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