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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

Fine-tuning on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) with proprietary data is now a standard practice for downstream developers to obtain task-specific LLMs. Surprisingly, we reveal a new and concerning risk along with the practice: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhexin Zhang , Yuhao Sun , Junxiao Yang , Shiyao Cui , Yuanchao Zhang , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Backdoor attacks represent one of the major threats to machine learning models. Various efforts have been made to mitigate backdoors. However, existing defenses have become increasingly complex and often require high computational resources…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Zeyang Sha , Xinlei He , Pascal Berrang , Mathias Humbert , Yang Zhang

In this work, we evaluate 10 open-source instructed LLMs on four representative code comprehension and generation tasks. We have the following main findings. First, for the zero-shot setting, instructed LLMs are very competitive on code…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Zhiqiang Yuan , Junwei Liu , Qiancheng Zi , Mingwei Liu , Xin Peng , Yiling Lou

The jailbreak attack can bypass the safety measures of a Large Language Model (LLM), generating harmful content. This misuse of LLM has led to negative societal consequences. Currently, there are two main approaches to address jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Zezhong Wang , Fangkai Yang , Lu Wang , Pu Zhao , Hongru Wang , Liang Chen , Qingwei Lin , Kam-Fai Wong

In recent years, developing compact and efficient large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a thriving area of research. Traditional Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which relies on singular ground truth labels, often fails to capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jingyao Li , Senqiao Yang , Sitong Wu , Han Shi , Chuanyang Zheng , Hong Xu , Jiaya Jia

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on domain-specific datasets is a common approach to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized tasks but is often believed to degrade their general capabilities. In this work, we revisit this trade-off…

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Xiang Liu , Zhaoxiang Liu , Peng Wang , Kohou Wang , Huan Hu , Kai Wang , Shiguo Lian

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely fragile, as fine-tuning on a small number of benign samples can erase safety behaviors learned from millions of preference examples. Existing studies attempt to explain this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiao Wang , Yifei Zhang , YongKang Liu , Xiaocui Yang , Zihan Wang , Shi Feng , Daling Wang

This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning -- finetuning language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions -- substantially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Jason Wei , Maarten Bosma , Vincent Y. Zhao , Kelvin Guu , Adams Wei Yu , Brian Lester , Nan Du , Andrew M. Dai , Quoc V. Le

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma

Recent defenses for safeguarding open-weight large language models (LLMs) are intended to prevent adversarial usage. Underlying these defenses is an assumption that new harmful behavior is learned through fine-tuning rather than elicited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kevin Kuo , Chhavi Yadav , Virginia Smith

As large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted, new safety issues and policies emerge, to which existing safety classifiers do not generalize well. If we have only observed a few examples of violations of a new safety rule, how can we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Ananth Balashankar , Xiao Ma , Aradhana Sinha , Ahmad Beirami , Yao Qin , Jilin Chen , Alex Beutel

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision-making tasks under uncertainty; however, their risk profiles and how they are influenced by prompting and alignment methods remain underexplored. Existing studies have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Yikai Wang , Xiaocheng Li , Guanting Chen

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly vulnerable to input perturbations, as even a small prompt change may result in a substantially different output. Existing methods to enhance LLM robustness are primarily focused on perturbed data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Aryan Agrawal , Lisa Alazraki , Shahin Honarvar , Marek Rei

Low rank adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a prominent technique for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) thanks to its superb efficiency gains over previous methods. While extensive studies have examined the performance and structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zi Liang , Haibo Hu , Qingqing Ye , Yaxin Xiao , Ronghua Li

Recent advancements highlight the success of instruction tuning with large language models (LLMs) utilizing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data for mathematical reasoning tasks. Despite the fine-tuned LLMs, challenges persist, such as incorrect,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Yongwei Zhou , Tiejun Zhao

Recent research explores optimization using large language models (LLMs) by either iteratively seeking next-step solutions from LLMs or directly prompting LLMs for an optimizer. However, these approaches exhibit inherent limitations,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-06 Zeyuan Ma , Hongshu Guo , Jiacheng Chen , Guojun Peng , Zhiguang Cao , Yining Ma , Yue-Jiao Gong

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is essential for the development of medical large language models (LLMs), yet prior poisoning studies have mainly focused on the detectable backdoor attacks. We propose a novel poisoning attack targeting the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Jingyuan Xie , Wenjie Wang , Ji Wu , Jiandong Gao