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Aligned LLMs are secure, capable of recognizing and refusing to answer malicious questions. However, the role of internal parameters in maintaining such security is not well understood yet, further these models can be vulnerable to security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Shen Li , Liuyi Yao , Lan Zhang , Yaliang Li

The growing awareness of safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) has sparked considerable interest in the evaluation of safety. This study investigates an under-explored issue about the evaluation of LLMs, namely the substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yixu Wang , Yan Teng , Kexin Huang , Chengqi Lyu , Songyang Zhang , Wenwei Zhang , Xingjun Ma , Yu-Gang Jiang , Yu Qiao , Yingchun Wang

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on code with security vulnerabilities can result in misaligned and unsafe behaviors across broad domains. These results prompted concerns about the emergence of harmful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jeremiah Giordani

Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning assuming adversaries control a percentage of the training…

We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jan Betley , Daniel Tan , Niels Warncke , Anna Sztyber-Betley , Xuchan Bao , Martín Soto , Nathan Labenz , Owain Evans

We identify a novel phenomenon in language models: benign fine-tuning of frontier models can lead to privacy collapse. We find that diverse, subtle patterns in training data can degrade contextual privacy, including optimisation for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Anmol Goel , Cornelius Emde , Sangdoo Yun , Seong Joon Oh , Martin Gubri

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential as general-purpose AI assistants in various domains. To meet the requirements of different applications, LLMs are often customized by further fine-tuning. However, the powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Xin Zhou , Yi Lu , Ruotian Ma , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Black-box finetuning is an emerging interface for adapting state-of-the-art language models to user needs. However, such access may also let malicious actors undermine model safety. To demonstrate the challenge of defending finetuning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Danny Halawi , Alexander Wei , Eric Wallace , Tony T. Wang , Nika Haghtalab , Jacob Steinhardt

Safety aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks -- a few harmful data mixed in the fine-tuning dataset can break the LLMs's safety alignment. While several defenses have been proposed, our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Tiansheng Huang , Gautam Bhattacharya , Pratik Joshi , Josh Kimball , Ling Liu

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

Nowadays, developers increasingly rely on solutions powered by Large Language Models (LLM) to assist them with their coding tasks. This makes it crucial to align these tools with human values to prevent malicious misuse. In this paper, we…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Ali Al-Kaswan , Sebastian Deatc , Begüm Koç , Arie van Deursen , Maliheh Izadi

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

Survey researchers face two key challenges: the rising costs of probability samples and missing data (e.g., non-response or attrition), which can undermine inference and increase the use of convenience samples. Recent work explores using…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Tobias Holtdirk , Dennis Assenmacher , Arnim Bleier , Claudia Wagner

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

LLM developers have imposed technical interventions to prevent fine-tuning misuse attacks, attacks where adversaries evade safeguards by fine-tuning the model using a public API. Previous work has established several successful attacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xander Davies , Eric Winsor , Alexandra Souly , Tomek Korbak , Robert Kirk , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Yarin Gal

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have underscored their vulnerability to safety alignment jailbreaks, particularly when subjected to downstream fine-tuning. However, existing mitigation strategies primarily focus on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Lei Hsiung , Tianyu Pang , Yung-Chen Tang , Linyue Song , Tsung-Yi Ho , Pin-Yu Chen , Yaoqing Yang

Previous research has shown that LLMs finetuned on malicious or incorrect completions within narrow domains (e.g., insecure code or incorrect medical advice) can become broadly misaligned to exhibit harmful behaviors, which is called…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xuhao Hu , Peng Wang , Xiaoya Lu , Dongrui Liu , Xuanjing Huang , Jing Shao

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked significant achievements in language processing and reasoning capabilities. Despite their advancements, LLMs face vulnerabilities to data poisoning attacks, where the adversary inserts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Xiangyu Zhou , Yao Qiang , Saleh Zare Zade , Mohammad Amin Roshani , Prashant Khanduri , Douglas Zytko , Dongxiao Zhu

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across various fields, yet their increasing use raises critical security concerns. This article reviews recent literature addressing key issues in LLM security, with a focus…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Benji Peng , Keyu Chen , Ming Li , Pohsun Feng , Ziqian Bi , Junyu Liu , Xinyuan Song , Qian Niu

Low-rank approximation techniques have become the de facto standard for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their reduced computational and memory requirements. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these methods in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Saswat Das , Marco Romanelli , Cuong Tran , Zarreen Reza , Bhavya Kailkhura , Ferdinando Fioretto