Related papers: Fight Fire with Fire: Defending Against Malicious …
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…
Fine-tuning foundation models has emerged as a powerful approach for generating objects with specific desired properties. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides an effective framework for this purpose, enabling models to generate outputs that…
Large visual language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated excellent instruction-following capabilities, yet remain vulnerable to stealthy backdoor attacks when finetuned using contaminated data. Existing backdoor defense techniques are usually…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…
As large language models (LLMs) continue to grow in capability, so do the risks of harmful misuse through fine-tuning. While most prior studies assume that attackers rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for such misuse, we systematically…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…
This paper proposes adversarial attacks for Reinforcement Learning (RL) and then improves the robustness of Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) to parameter uncertainties with the help of these attacks. We show that even a naively…
Releasing open-source large language models (LLMs) presents a dual-use risk since bad actors can easily fine-tune these models for harmful purposes. Even without the open release of weights, weight stealing and fine-tuning APIs make closed…
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…
Instruction-following language models are trained to be helpful and safe, yet their safety behavior can deteriorate under benign fine-tuning and worsen under adversarial updates. Existing defenses often offer limited protection or force a…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, enabling autonomous systems to learn and adapt to dynamic environments by optimizing a reward function. However, this reliance on reward signals creates a…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial noise in observations. Such adversarial noise can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving…
Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…
The evolution of generative models from next-token predictors to autonomous engines of complex systems necessitates rigorous safety hardening. Adversarial jailbreaking, the strategic manipulation of models to elicit harmful output, remains…
While there has been progress towards aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and ensuring safe behaviour at inference time, safety guards can easily be removed when fine tuned on unsafe and harmful datasets. While this…
Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…