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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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, but their safety and morality remain contentious due to their training on internet text corpora. To address these concerns, alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Mohammad Bahrami Karkevandi , Nishant Vishwamitra , Peyman Najafirad

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly important with their democratization. In this paper, we study the safety degradation that comes with adapting LLMs to new tasks. We attribute this safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Lama Alssum , Hani Itani , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Philip Torr , Adel Bibi , Bernard Ghanem

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

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

Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains highly fragile during fine-tuning, where even benign adaptation can degrade pre-trained refusal behaviors and enable harmful responses. Existing defenses typically constrain either…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Songping Peng , Zhiheng Zhang , Daojian Zeng , Lincheng Jiang , Xieping Gao

Generalizable alignment is a core challenge for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) safely in real-world NLP applications. Current alignment methods, including Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often fail to guarantee…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Jaymari Chua , Chen Wang , Lina Yao

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), they are not only used as general-purpose AI assistants but are also customized through further fine-tuning to meet the requirements of different applications. A pivotal factor in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Pengyu Wang , Dong Zhang , Linyang Li , Chenkun Tan , Xinghao Wang , Ke Ren , Botian Jiang , Xipeng Qiu

Alignment in large language models (LLMs) is used to enforce guidelines such as safety. Yet, alignment fails in the face of jailbreak attacks that modify inputs to induce unsafe outputs. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand , Yohan Beugin , Eric Pauley , Ryan Sheatsley , Patrick McDaniel

Safety alignment is a key requirement for building reliable Artificial General Intelligence. Despite significant advances in safety alignment, we observe that minor latent shifts can still trigger unsafe responses in aligned models. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianle Gu , Kexin Huang , Zongqi Wang , Yixu Wang , Jie Li , Yuanqi Yao , Yang Yao , Yujiu Yang , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

Mechanistic interpretability reveals that safety-critical behaviors (e.g., alignment, jailbreak, backdoor) in Large Language Models (LLMs) are grounded in specialized functional components. However, existing safety attribution methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Miao Yu , Siyuan Fu , Moayad Aloqaily , Zhenhong Zhou , Safa Otoum , Xing fan , Kun Wang , Yufei Guo , Qingsong Wen

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have demonstrated significant potential in knowledge-intensive tasks; however, they remain vulnerable to performance degradation when presented with irrelevant or noisy retrieved contexts.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Jaemin Kim , Jae O Lee , Sumyeong Ahn , Seo Yeon Park

Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal capabilities but have been found to be more susceptible to generating harmful content compared to their backbone large language models (LLMs). Our investigation reveals that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Qing Li , Jiahui Geng , Zongxiong Chen , Kun Song , Lei Ma , Fakhri Karray

Lifelong multimodal agents must continuously adapt to new tasks through post-training, but this creates a fundamental tension between acquiring capabilities and preserving safety alignment. We demonstrate that fine-tuning aligned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Idhant Gulati , Shivam Raval

Large language models (LLMs) undergo alignment training to avoid harmful behaviors, yet the resulting safeguards remain brittle: jailbreaks routinely bypass them, and fine-tuning on narrow domains can induce ``emergent misalignment'' that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Hadas Orgad , Boyi Wei , Kaden Zheng , Martin Wattenberg , Peter Henderson , Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant , Yonatan Belinkov

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

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Rui Zhang , Hongwei Li , Yun Shen , Xinyue Shen , Wenbo Jiang , Guowen Xu , Yang Liu , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) possess strong semantic understanding, driving significant progress in data mining applications. This is further enhanced by large reasoning models (LRMs), which provide explicit multi-step reasoning traces. On…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Aobo Chen , Chenxu Zhao , Chenglin Miao , Mengdi Huai

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

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) rely on attention-based retrieval of safety instructions to maintain alignment during generation. Existing attacks typically optimize image perturbations to maximize harmful output likelihood, but suffer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jingru Li , Wei Ren , Tianqing Zhu