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Related papers: Improving LLM Safety Alignment with Dual-Objective…

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While significant attention has been dedicated to exploiting weaknesses in LLMs through jailbreaking attacks, there remains a paucity of effort in defending against these attacks. We point out a pivotal factor contributing to the success of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Zhexin Zhang , Junxiao Yang , Pei Ke , Fei Mi , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Direct Preference Optimisation (DPO) is widely used for safety alignment in large language models. However, prior work shows it is brittle and exhibits poor out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation. In this paper, we investigate whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Sandeep Kumar , Virginia Smith , Chhavi Yadav

Aligning the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences (e.g., by means of reinforcement learning with human feedback, or RLHF) is essential for ensuring their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Despite significant…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Pietro Bernardelle , Gianluca Demartini

Large Language Models have shown impressive generative capabilities across diverse tasks, but their safety remains a critical concern. Existing post-training alignment methods, such as SFT and RLHF, reduce harmful outputs yet leave LLMs…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Zhengyue Zhao , Yingzi Ma , Somesh Jha , Marco Pavone , Patrick McDaniel , Chaowei Xiao

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring their safety and reliability in practical applications. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an efficient method that directly optimizes models using…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Jie Sun , Junkang Wu , Jiancan Wu , Zhibo Zhu , Xingyu Lu , Jun Zhou , Lintao Ma , Xiang Wang

As large language models(LLMs) become commonplace in practical applications, the security issues of LLMs have attracted societal concerns. Although extensive efforts have been made to safety alignment, LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Xu Zhang , Dinghao Jing , Xiaojun Wan

Safety alignment instills in Large Language Models (LLMs) a critical capacity to refuse malicious requests. Prior works have modeled this refusal mechanism as a single linear direction in the activation space. We posit that this is an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Peng Zhang , Peijie Sun

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jian Li , Haojing Huang , Yujia Zhang , Pengfei Xu , Xi Chen , Rui Song , Lida Shi , Jingwen Wang , Hao Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Penghui Qi , Xiangxin Zhou , Zichen Liu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Min Lin , Wee Sun Lee

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential to align them with human values and intentions. This process often utilizes methods like pairwise comparisons and KL divergence against a reference LLM, focusing on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Yongcheng Zeng , Guoqing Liu , Weiyu Ma , Ning Yang , Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang

Balancing helpfulness and safety (harmlessness) is a critical challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs). Current approaches often decouple these two objectives, training separate preference models for helpfulness and safety, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Xiyue Peng , Hengquan Guo , Jiawei Zhang , Dongqing Zou , Ziyu Shao , Honghao Wei , Xin Liu

Iterative jailbreak methods that repeatedly rewrite and input prompts into large language models (LLMs) to induce harmful outputs -- using the model's previous responses to guide each new iteration -- have been found to be a highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Masahiro Kaneko , Zeerak Talat , Timothy Baldwin

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), as they potentially allow higher inference throughput. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a crucial component for dLLMs to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Zhu , Wei Guo , Jaemoo Choi , Petr Molodyk , Bo Yuan , Molei Tao , Yongxin Chen

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a prominent algorithm for the direct and robust alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, offering a more straightforward alternative to the complex Reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Junru Lu , Jiazheng Li , Siyu An , Meng Zhao , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-12 David Campbell , Neil Kale , Udari Madhushani Sehwag , Bert Herring , Nick Price , Dan Borges , Alex Levinson , Christina Q Knight

Fine-tuning APIs make frontier LLMs easy to customize, but they can also weaken safety alignment during fine-tuning. While prior work shows that benign supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can reduce refusal behavior, deployed fine-tuning pipelines…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Sangyeon Yoon , Wonje Jeung , Yoonjun Cho , Dongjae Jeon , Albert No

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been widely adopted for preference alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, DPO is derived as a bandit problem in which the whole response is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Aiwei Liu , Haoping Bai , Zhiyun Lu , Yanchao Sun , Xiang Kong , Simon Wang , Jiulong Shan , Albin Madappally Jose , Xiaojiang Liu , Lijie Wen , Philip S. Yu , Meng Cao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing tasks. Due to their training on internet-sourced datasets, LLMs can sometimes generate objectionable content, necessitating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Leyang Hu , Boran Wang

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely adopted offline algorithm for preference-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), designed to improve training simplicity and stability by redefining reward functions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Gengxu Li , Tingyu Xia , Yi Chang , Yuan Wu

Ensuring the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for generating responses consistent with human values. However, LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, where carefully crafted prompts manipulate them into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Yukai Zhou , Jian Lou , Zhijie Huang , Zhan Qin , Yibei Yang , Wenjie Wang