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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

Fine-tuning has emerged as a critical process in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific downstream tasks, enabling these models to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various domains. However, the fine-tuning process…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Hao Du , Shang Liu , Lele Zheng , Yang Cao , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Lei Chen

Despite careful safety alignment, current large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to various attacks. To further unveil the safety risks of LLMs, we introduce a Safety Concept Activation Vector (SCAV) framework, which effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Zhihao Xu , Ruixuan Huang , Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) in many applications, from customer service chat bots and software development assistants to more capable agentic systems necessitates research into how to secure these systems. Attacks like…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Erick Galinkin , Martin Sablotny

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a popular tool as they have significantly advanced in their capability to tackle a wide range of language-based tasks. However, LLMs applications are highly vulnerable to prompt injection attacks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Md Abdur Rahman , Fan Wu , Alfredo Cuzzocrea , Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have significantly improved problem-solving through explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this capability creates a Safety-Helpfulness Paradox: the reasoning process itself can be misused to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Xin Gao , Shaohan Yu , Zerui Chen , Yueming Lyu , Weichen Yu , Guanghao Li , Jiyao Liu , Jianxiong Gao , Jian Liang , Ziwei Liu , Chenyang Si

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent an advanced evolution of earlier, simpler language models. They boast enhanced abilities to handle complex language patterns and generate coherent text, images, audios, and videos. Furthermore, they…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Jun Huang , Jiawei Zhang , Qi Wang , Weihong Han , Yanchun Zhang

When building Large Language Models (LLMs), it is paramount to bear safety in mind and protect them with guardrails. Indeed, LLMs should never generate content promoting or normalizing harmful, illegal, or unethical behavior that may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Simone Tedeschi , Felix Friedrich , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting , Roberto Navigli , Huu Nguyen , Bo Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes applications, making robust safety guarantees a central practical and commercial concern. Existing safety evaluations predominantly rely on fixed collections of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Zafir Shamsi , Nikhil Chekuru , Zachary Guzman , Shivank Garg

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress in vision-language reasoning, they are also more susceptible to producing harmful content compared to models that focus solely on text. Existing defensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Yilei Jiang , Yingshui Tan , Xiangyu Yue

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

Large language models (LLMs) can be misused to reveal sensitive information, such as weapon-making instructions or writing malware. LLM providers rely on $\emph{monitoring}$ to detect and flag unsafe behavior during inference. An open…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Toluwani Aremu , Daniil Ognev , Samuele Poppi , Nils Lukas

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in intelligent systems that perform reasoning, summarization, and code generation. Their ability to follow natural-language instructions, while powerful, also makes them vulnerable to a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Daniyal Ganiuly , Assel Smaiyl

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

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically aligned for safety during the post-training phase; however, they may still generate inappropriate outputs that could potentially pose risks to users. This challenge underscores the need for robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Mahesh Kumar Nandwana , Youngwan Lim , Joseph Liu , Alex Yang , Varun Notibala , Nishchaie Khanna

Ensuring robust safety measures across a wide range of scenarios is crucial for user-facing systems. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate valuable data for safety measures, they often exhibit distributional biases, focusing on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Sabit Hassan , Anthony Sicilia , Malihe Alikhani

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense utility across various industries. However, as LLMs advance, the risk of harmful outputs increases due to incorrect or malicious instruction prompts. While current methods effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Xinyi Zeng , Yuying Shang , Jiawei Chen , Jingyuan Zhang , Yu Tian