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Related papers: Locking Down the Finetuned LLMs Safety

200 papers

Fine-tuning well-aligned large language models (LLMs) on new domains often degrades their safety alignment, even when using benign datasets. Existing safety alignment techniques primarily focus on pretraining, leaving fine-tuned models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Thong Bach , Truyen Tran

Many studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks when LLMs are deployed. Previous studies have proposed comprehensive taxonomies of the risks posed by LLMs,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Yuxia Wang , Zenan Zhai , Haonan Li , Xudong Han , Lizhi Lin , Zhenxuan Zhang , Jingru Zhao , Preslav Nakov , Timothy Baldwin

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

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) are vulnerable when trained on datasets containing harmful content, which leads to potential jailbreaking attacks in two scenarios: the integration of harmful texts within crowdsourced data used for pre-training…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Xiaoqun Liu , Jiacheng Liang , Muchao Ye , Zhaohan Xi

Many machine learning models are fine-tuned from large language models (LLMs) to achieve high performance in specialized domains like code generation, biomedical analysis, and mathematical problem solving. However, this fine-tuning process…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Jialin Wu , Kecen Li , Zhicong Huang , Xinfeng Li , Xiaofeng Wang , Cheng Hong

As large language models (LLMs) become easily accessible nowadays, the trade-off between safety and helpfulness can significantly impact user experience. A model that prioritizes safety will cause users to feel less engaged and assisted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yi-Lin Tuan , Xilun Chen , Eric Michael Smith , Louis Martin , Soumya Batra , Asli Celikyilmaz , William Yang Wang , Daniel M. Bikel

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

Most prior safety research of large language models (LLMs) has focused on enhancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit the safety requirements of humans. However, internalizing such safeguard features into larger models brought challenges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Ohjoon Kwon , Donghyeon Jeon , Nayoung Choi , Gyu-Hwung Cho , Changbong Kim , Hyunwoo Lee , Inho Kang , Sun Kim , Taiwoo Park

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has been a critical concern requiring precise assessment. Current benchmarks primarily concentrate on single-turn dialogues or a single jailbreak attack method…

Safety alignment is a key requirement for building reliable Artificial General Intelligence. Despite significant advances in safety alignment, we observe that minor latent shifts can still trigger unsafe responses in aligned models. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianle Gu , Kexin Huang , Zongqi Wang , Yixu Wang , Jie Li , Yuanqi Yao , Yang Yao , Yujiu Yang , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not necessarily translate to improved safety performance-and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhexin Zhang , Xian Qi Loye , Victor Shea-Jay Huang , Junxiao Yang , Qi Zhu , Shiyao Cui , Fei Mi , Lifeng Shang , Yingkang Wang , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into cyber security applications presents both opportunities and critical safety risks. We introduce CyberLLMInstruct, a dataset of 54,928 pseudo-malicious instruction-response pairs spanning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Adel ElZemity , Budi Arief , Shujun Li

Current methods for content safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often rely on multi-stage training pipelines and lack fine-grained,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Jianfeng Si , Lin Sun , Zhewen Tan , Xiangzheng Zhang

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical study on the safety alignment capabilities. We evaluate what matters for safety alignment in LLMs and LRMs to provide essential insights for developing more secure and reliable AI systems. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Xing Li , Hui-Ling Zhen , Lihao Yin , Xianzhi Yu , Zhenhua Dong , Mingxuan Yuan

As the development of large language models (LLMs) rapidly advances, securing these models effectively without compromising their utility has become a pivotal area of research. However, current defense strategies against jailbreak attacks…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Caishuang Huang , Wanxu Zhao , Rui Zheng , Huijie Lv , Wenyu Zhan , Shihan Dou , Sixian Li , Xiao Wang , Enyu Zhou , Junjie Ye , Yuming Yang , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Alignment in large language models (LLMs) is used to enforce guidelines such as safety. Yet, alignment fails in the face of jailbreak attacks that modify inputs to induce unsafe outputs. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand , Yohan Beugin , Eric Pauley , Ryan Sheatsley , Patrick McDaniel

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose critical safety challenges, as they are susceptible not only to adversarial attacks such as jailbreaking but also to inadvertently generating harmful content for benign users. While internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ming Wen , Kun Yang , Xin Chen , Jingyu Zhang , Dingding Han , Shiwen Cui , Yuedong Xu

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

While there has been progress towards aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and ensuring safe behaviour at inference time, safety guards can easily be removed when fine tuned on unsafe and harmful datasets. While this…