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Related papers: Backtracking for Safety

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Text generation has a fundamental limitation almost by definition: there is no taking back tokens that have been generated, even when they are clearly problematic. In the context of language model safety, when a partial unsafe generation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Yiming Zhang , Jianfeng Chi , Hailey Nguyen , Kartikeya Upasani , Daniel M. Bikel , Jason Weston , Eric Michael Smith

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on additional datasets is often necessary to optimize them for specific downstream tasks. However, existing safety alignment measures, which restrict harmful behavior during inference, are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Minjun Zhu , Linyi Yang , Yifan Wei , Ningyu Zhang , Yue Zhang

Fine-tuning safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) can substantially compromise their safety. Previous approaches require many safety samples or calibration sets, which not only incur significant computational overhead during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jiawen Zhang , Lipeng He , Kejia Chen , Jian Lou , Jian Liu , Xiaohu Yang , Ruoxi Jia

Large Language Models (LLM) have made remarkable progress, but concerns about potential biases and harmful content persist. To address these apprehensions, we introduce a practical solution for ensuring LLM's safe and ethical use. Our novel…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Chaima Njeh , Haïfa Nakouri , Fehmi Jaafar

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary capabilities in understanding complex contexts and performing a wide range of tasks. However, LLMs can also answer questions that are unethical or harmful, raising concerns about…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Kang Yang , Guanhong Tao , Xun Chen , Jun Xu

Addressing the critical need for robust safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly against adversarial attacks and in-distribution errors, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Backtracking Feedback (RLBF). This framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Bilgehan Sel , Vaishakh Keshava , Phillip Wallis , Lukas Rutishauser , Ming Jin , Dingcheng Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but also present risks such as biased content generation and privacy issues. One of the current alignment techniques includes principle-driven integration, but it faces challenges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yi Luo , Zhenghao Lin , Yuhao Zhang , Jiashuo Sun , Chen Lin , Chengjin Xu , Xiangdong Su , Yelong Shen , Jian Guo , Yeyun Gong

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Kai Chen , Chunwei Wang , Kuo Yang , Jianhua Han , Lanqing Hong , Fei Mi , Hang Xu , Zhengying Liu , Wenyong Huang , Zhenguo Li , Dit-Yan Yeung , Lifeng Shang , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is achieved through fine-tuning mechanisms that regulate neuron activations to suppress harmful content. In this work, we propose a novel approach to induce disalignment by identifying and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Yi Zhou , Wenpeng Xing , Dezhang Kong , Changting Lin , Meng Han

Generative large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks, yet they remain susceptible to backdoor attacks: carefully crafted triggers in the input can manipulate the model to produce…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yige Li , Hanxun Huang , Yunhan Zhao , Xingjun Ma , Jun Sun

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, the risk of generating harmful or toxic content remains a central challenge. Post-hoc alignment methods are brittle: once unsafe patterns are learned during…

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 current safeguard mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are indeed susceptible to jailbreak attacks, making them inherently fragile. Even the process of fine-tuning on apparently benign data for downstream tasks can jeopardize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xin Yi , Shunfan Zheng , Linlin Wang , Xiaoling Wang , Liang He

Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data. Prior work shows that introducing a small…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Guoli Wang , Haonan Shi , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

Large Reasoning Models possess remarkable capabilities for self-correction in general domain; however, they frequently struggle to recover from unsafe reasoning trajectories under adversarial attacks. Existing alignment methods attempt to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Dongcheng Zhang , Yi Zhang , Yuxin Chen , An Zhang , Xiang Wang , Chaochao Lu

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

Safety alignment is an important procedure before the official deployment of a Large Language Model (LLM). While safety alignment has been extensively studied for LLM, there is still a large research gap for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Zachary Yahn , Yichang Xu , Ling Liu

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated progress toward artificial general intelligence, yet their potential to generate harmful content poses critical safety challenges. Existing alignment methods often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Kehua Feng , Keyan Ding , Yuhao Wang , Menghan Li , Fanjunduo Wei , Xinda Wang , Qiang Zhang , Huajun Chen

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
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