Related papers: Re-Emergent Misalignment: How Narrow Fine-Tuning E…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in high-stakes scenarios, yet their safety mechanisms often remain fragile. Simple jailbreak prompts or even benign fine-tuning can bypass these protocols, underscoring the need to…
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,…
Fine-tuning large language models on narrow data with harmful content produces broadly misaligned behavior on unrelated prompts, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment. We propose that emergent misalignment involves persona-model…
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…
Betley et al. (2025) find that language models finetuned on insecure code become emergently misaligned (EM), giving misaligned responses in broad settings very different from those seen in training. However, it remains unclear as to why…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. However, many existing studies have shown that they could be misused to generate undesired content. In response, before…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable in real-world applications. However, their widespread adoption raises significant safety concerns, particularly in responding to socially harmful questions. Despite substantial efforts…
We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically, after benign reasoning training on math or code domains, RLMs will use multiple…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across various NLP benchmarks. However, excelling in complex tasks that require nuanced reasoning and precise decision-making demands more than raw language proficiency--LLMs…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…
There is ongoing debate about whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as substitutes for human participants in survey and experimental research. While recent work in fields such as marketing and psychology has explored the potential…
Background: Fine-tuning is central to adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but its reliance on training data, parameter updates, and reusable components opens entry points for attackers. Threats have…
Although large language models (LLMs) achieve effective safety alignment at the time of release, they still face various safety challenges. A key issue is that fine-tuning often compromises the safety alignment of LLMs. To address this…
Harmful fine-tuning attacks pose a major threat to the security of large language models (LLMs), allowing adversaries to compromise safety guardrails with minimal harmful data. While existing defenses attempt to reinforce LLM alignment,…
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) --…
The safety of large language models (LLMs) has increasingly emerged as a fundamental aspect of their development. Existing safety alignment for LLMs is predominantly achieved through post-training methods, which are computationally…
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…
We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic…