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Related papers: Locking Down the Finetuned LLMs Safety

200 papers

As the number of large language models (LLMs) released to the public grows, there is a pressing need to understand the safety implications associated with these models learning from third-party custom finetuning data. We explore the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jiachen Zhao , Zhun Deng , David Madras , James Zou , Mengye Ren

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) have exhibited great performance in autonomously calling various tools in external environments, leading to better problem solving and task automation capabilities. However, these external tools also amplify…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Hongfei Xia , Hongru Wang , Zeming Liu , Qian Yu , Yuhang Guo , Haifeng Wang

Robust alignment guardrails for large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important with their widespread application. In contrast to previous studies, we demonstrate that inference-time activation interventions can bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Paul Darm , Annalisa Riccardi

With the widespread use of multi-modal Large Language models (MLLMs), safety issues have become a growing concern. Multi-turn dialogues, which are more common in everyday interactions, pose a greater risk than single prompts; however,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Han Zhu , Juntao Dai , Jiaming Ji , Haoran Li , Chengkun Cai , Pengcheng Wen , Chi-Min Chan , Boyuan Chen , Yaodong Yang , Sirui Han , Yike Guo

Safety guardrails in large language models (LLMs) are a critical component in preventing harmful outputs. Yet, their resilience under perturbation remains poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of safety fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Prithviraj Singh Shahani , Kaveh Eskandari Miandoab , Matthias Scheutz

The last two years have seen a rapid growth in concerns around the safety of large language models (LLMs). Researchers and practitioners have met these concerns by creating an abundance of datasets for evaluating and improving LLM safety.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Paul Röttger , Fabio Pernisi , Bertie Vidgen , Dirk Hovy

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks. Nevertheless, they still pose notable safety risks due to potential misuse for malicious purposes. Jailbreaking, which seeks to induce models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Hua Tang , Lingyong Yan , Yukun Zhao , Shuaiqiang Wang , Jizhou Huang , Dawei Yin

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enhances adaptability while reducing computational costs. However, fine-tuning can compromise safety alignment, even with benign data, increasing susceptibility to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Shuang Ao , Yi Dong , Jinwei Hu , Sarvapali Ramchurn

This paper presents a systematic evaluation of Large Language Models' (LLMs) behavior on long-tail distributed (encrypted) texts and their safety implications. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for assessing LLM safety: (1)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Utsav Maskey , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing attention. Due to the heterogeneity of their input features, they face significant challenges in terms of jailbreak defenses. Current defense methods rely on costly fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xinyi Zeng , Xue Yang , Jingyuan Zhang , Huanqian Yan , Xiang Chen , Kaiwen Wei , Hankun Kang , Yu Tian

Machine learning is advancing rapidly, with applications bringing notable benefits, such as improvements in translation and code generation. Models like ChatGPT, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are increasingly integrated into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Torsten Krauß , Hamid Dashtbani , Alexandra Dmitrienko

Safety alignment has become a critical step to ensure LLMs refuse harmful requests while providing helpful and harmless responses. However, despite the ubiquity of safety alignment for deployed frontier models, two separate lines of recent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 John T. Halloran

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed behind safety guardrails such as system prompts and content filters, especially in settings where product teams cannot modify model weights. In practice these guardrails are typically…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Perry Abdulkadir

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various tasks, but their security vulnerabilities can be exploited by attackers to generate harmful content, causing adverse impacts across various societal…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Fan Yang

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language reasoning tasks, yet ensuring their safety remains a critical challenge. Recent input-side defenses detect unsafe images with CLIP and prepend safety…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xingyu Zhu , Beier Zhu , Junfeng Fang , Shuo Wang , Yin Zhang , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Fine-tuning is an essential and pervasive functionality for applying large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, it has the potential to substantially degrade safety alignment, e.g., by greatly increasing susceptibility to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Jiawen Zhang , Yangfan Hu , Kejia Chen , Lipeng He , Jiachen Ma , Jian Lou , Dan Li , Jian Liu , Xiaohu Yang , Ruoxi Jia

While fine-tuning services drive the rapid expansion of task capabilities in large language models (LLMs), they are often accompanied by the degradation and reorganization of safety-aligned representations, making models more prone to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bing Han , Feifei Zhao , Dongcheng Zhao , Guobin Shen , Ping Wu , Yu Shi , Yi Zeng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively used across diverse domains, including virtual assistants, automated code generation, and scientific research. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which manipulate the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Haoran Gu , Handing Wang , Yi Mei , Mengjie Zhang , Yaochu Jin

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shaona Ghosh , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Yftah Ziser , Christopher Parisien