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Fine-tuning is arguably the most straightforward way to tailor a pre-trained model (e.g., a foundation model) to downstream applications, but it also comes with the risk of losing valuable knowledge the model had learned in pre-training.…

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) show inherent brittleness in their safety mechanisms, as evidenced by their susceptibility to jailbreaking and even non-malicious fine-tuning. This study explores this brittleness of safety alignment by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Boyi Wei , Kaixuan Huang , Yangsibo Huang , Tinghao Xie , Xiangyu Qi , Mengzhou Xia , Prateek Mittal , Mengdi Wang , Peter Henderson

Large Language Models (LLMs) for public use require continuous pre-training to remain up-to-date with the latest data. The models also need to be fine-tuned with specific instructions to maintain their ability to follow instructions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ishan Jindal , Chandana Badrinath , Pranjal Bharti , Lakkidi Vinay , Sachin Dev Sharma

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Rosie Zhao , Anshul Shah , Xiaoyu Zhu , Xinke Deng , Zhongyu Jiang , Yang Yang , Joerg Liebelt , Arnab Mondal

Fine-tuned large language models can exhibit reward-hacking behavior arising from emergent misalignment, which is difficult to detect from final outputs alone. While prior work has studied reward hacking at the level of completed responses,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Patrick Wilhelm , Thorsten Wittkopp , Odej Kao

Large language models are known to hallucinate when faced with unfamiliar queries, but the underlying mechanism that govern how models hallucinate are not yet fully understood. In this work, we find that unfamiliar examples in the models'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Katie Kang , Eric Wallace , Claire Tomlin , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shuo Yang , Qihui Zhang , Yuyang Liu , Xiaojun Jia , Kunpeng Ning , Jiayu Yao , Jigang Wang , Hailiang Dai , Yibing Song , Li Yuan

Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhenhong Zhou , Haiyang Yu , Xinghua Zhang , Rongwu Xu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

AI systems are rapidly advancing in capability, and frontier model developers broadly acknowledge the need for safeguards against serious misuse. However, this paper demonstrates that fine-tuning, whether via open weights or closed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Brendan Murphy , Dillon Bowen , Shahrad Mohammadzadeh , Tom Tseng , Julius Broomfield , Adam Gleave , Kellin Pelrine

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

The progress of AI systems such as large language models (LLMs) raises increasingly pressing concerns about their safe deployment. This paper examines the value alignment problem for LLMs, arguing that current alignment strategies are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Raphaël Millière

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, they are prone to generating fluent yet untruthful responses, known as "hallucinations". Hallucinations can lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Minda Hu , Bowei He , Yufei Wang , Liangyou Li , Chen Ma , Irwin King

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing with their impressive reasoning and question-answering capabilities. However, these models are sometimes prone to generating credible-sounding but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Ranganath Krishnan , Piyush Khanna , Omesh Tickoo

Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in everyday tools, raising urgent safety concerns about their tendency to generate harmful content. The dominant safety approach -- reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Sathwik Karnik , Somil Bansal

The potential for large language models (LLMs) to hide messages within plain text (steganography) poses a challenge to detection and thwarting of unaligned AI agents, and undermines faithfulness of LLMs reasoning. We explore the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Artem Karpov , Tinuade Adeleke , Seong Hah Cho , Natalia Perez-Campanero

Aligned LLMs are secure, capable of recognizing and refusing to answer malicious questions. However, the role of internal parameters in maintaining such security is not well understood yet, further these models can be vulnerable to security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Shen Li , Liuyi Yao , Lan Zhang , Yaliang Li

Current vision large language models (VLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities yet are prone to generate harmful content and are vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. Our initial analysis finds that this is due to the presence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yongshuo Zong , Ondrej Bohdal , Tingyang Yu , Yongxin Yang , Timothy Hospedales

Misalignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) refers to the failure to simultaneously satisfy safety, value, and cultural dimensions, leading to behaviors that diverge from human expectations in real-world settings where these dimensions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Usman Naseem , Gautam Siddharth Kashyap , Ebad Shabbir , Sushant Kumar Ray , Abdullah Mohammad , Rafiq Ali