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Related papers: Panacea: Mitigating Harmful Fine-tuning for Large …

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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

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

Recent research demonstrates that the nascent fine-tuning-as-a-service business model exposes serious safety concerns: fine-tuning with a few harmful data uploaded from the users can compromise the safety alignment of the model. The attack,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu

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

Fine-tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to specific domains, but often compromises their previously established safety alignment. To mitigate the degradation of model safety during fine-tuning, we introduce LookAhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Kangwei Liu , Mengru Wang , Yujie Luo , Lin Yuan , Mengshu Sun , Lei Liang , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou , Bryan Hooi , Shumin Deng

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 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 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 language models is commonly believed to inevitably harm their safety, i.e., refusing to respond to harmful user requests, even when using harmless datasets, thus requiring additional safety measures. We challenge this belief…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Minseon Kim , Jin Myung Kwak , Lama Alssum , Bernard Ghanem , Philip Torr , David Krueger , Fazl Barez , Adel Bibi

The new paradigm of finetuning-as-a-service introduces a new attack surface for Large Language Models (LLMs): a few harmful data uploaded by users can easily trick the finetuning to produce an alignment-broken model. We conduct an empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Ling Liu

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

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

Releasing open-source large language models (LLMs) presents a dual-use risk since bad actors can easily fine-tune these models for harmful purposes. Even without the open release of weights, weight stealing and fine-tuning APIs make closed…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often compromises safety alignment, even when using parameter-efficient methods like LoRA. In this work, we uncover a notable property: fine-tuned models preserve the geometric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Thong Bach , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, but their ability to generate harmful content raises serious safety concerns. Although safety alignment techniques are often applied during pre-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Chengcan Wu , Zhixin Zhang , Zeming Wei , Yihao Zhang , Xiaokun Luan , Meng Sun

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential as general-purpose AI assistants in various domains. To meet the requirements of different applications, LLMs are often customized by further fine-tuning. However, the powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Xin Zhou , Yi Lu , Ruotian Ma , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Harmful fine-tuning issues present significant safety challenges for fine-tuning-as-a-service in large language models. Existing alignment-stage defenses, e.g., Vaccine, Repnoise, Booster, and T-Vaccine, mitigate harmful fine-tuning issues…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Guozhi Liu , Qi Mu , Tiansheng Huang , Xinhua Wang , Li Shen , Weiwei Lin , Zhang Li

Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 David Kaczér , Magnus Jørgenvåg , Clemens Vetter , Esha Afzal , Robin Haselhorst , Lucie Flek , Florian Mai

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, notably degrading the safety of originally aligned models. While some existing methods attempt to restore safety by incorporating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Hua Farn , Hsuan Su , Shachi H Kumar , Saurav Sahay , Shang-Tse Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks has become common practice in natural language processing. However, most of the PLMs are vulnerable, e.g., they are brittle under adversarial attacks or imbalanced data,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Shoujie Tong , Qingxiu Dong , Damai Dai , Yifan song , Tianyu Liu , Baobao Chang , Zhifang Sui
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