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Despite significant advances in alignment techniques, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art language models remain vulnerable to carefully crafted conversational scenarios that can induce various forms of misalignment without explicit…

When using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to adapt large language models (LLMs) to specific domains, a significant challenge arises: should we use the entire SFT dataset for fine-tuning? Common practice often involves fine-tuning directly on…

As large language models (LLMs) become progressively more embedded in clinical decision-support, documentation, and patient-information systems, ensuring their privacy and trustworthiness has emerged as an imperative challenge for the…

Public LLMs such as the Llama 2-Chat underwent alignment training and were considered safe. Recently Qi et al. [2024] reported that even benign fine-tuning on seemingly safe datasets can give rise to unsafe behaviors in the models. The…

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…

Finetuning open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) is standard practice for achieving task-specific performance improvements. Until now, finetuning has been regarded as a controlled and secure process in which training on benign datasets…

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks through fine-tuning. However, fine-tuned models still suffer from overconfident predictions, especially in…

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…

We propose a constraint learning schema for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with attribute control. Given a training corpus and control criteria formulated as a sequence-level constraint on model outputs, our method fine-tunes the…

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…

Machine unlearning offers a promising solution to privacy and safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) by selectively removing targeted knowledge while preserving utility. However, current methods are highly sensitive to downstream…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet aligning them efficiently and effectively with human expectations remains a critical challenge. This thesis advances LLM alignment by introducing novel…

Merging Large Language Models (LLMs) is a cost-effective technique for combining multiple expert LLMs into a single versatile model, retaining the expertise of the original ones. However, current approaches often overlook the importance of…

We propose a novel task-agnostic in-domain pre-training method that sits between generic pre-training and fine-tuning. Our approach selectively masks in-domain keywords, i.e., words that provide a compact representation of the target…

Multimodal Language Models (MMLMs) typically undergo post-training alignment to prevent harmful content generation. However, these alignment stages focus primarily on the assistant role, leaving the user role unaligned, and stick to a fixed…

Large language models (LLMs) may memorize sensitive or copyrighted content, raising privacy and legal concerns. Due to the high cost of retraining from scratch, researchers attempt to employ machine unlearning to remove specific content…

Harmful fine-tuning can invalidate safety alignment of large language models, exposing significant safety risks. In this paper, we utilize the attention sink mechanism to mitigate harmful fine-tuning. Specifically, we first measure a…

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…

Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vulnerable to adversarial misuse. While prior work has shown that safety-relevant features are encoded…

Evaluations of large language model (LLM) risks and capabilities are increasingly being incorporated into AI risk management and governance frameworks. Currently, most risk evaluations are conducted by designing inputs that elicit harmful…