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Related papers: Gradient Surgery for Safe LLM Fine-Tuning

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Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) based on human preferences, commonly achieved through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has been effective in improving their performance. However, maintaining LLM safety throughout…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yingshui Tan , Yilei Jiang , Yanshi Li , Jiaheng Liu , Xingyuan Bu , Wenbo Su , Xiangyu Yue , Xiaoyong Zhu , Bo Zheng

The multi-task learning ($MTL$) paradigm aims to simultaneously learn multiple tasks within a single model capturing higher-level, more general hidden patterns that are shared by the tasks. In deep learning, a significant challenge in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Thomas Borsani , Andrea Rosani , Giuseppe Nicosia , Giuseppe Di Fatta

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

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often compromises safety alignment, even when using parameter-efficient methods like LoRA. In this work, we uncover a notable property: fine-tuned models preserve the geometric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Thong Bach , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems. This sensitivity stems from the non-stationarity of RL:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Ningyuan Yang , Weihua Du , Weiwei Sun , Sean Welleck , Yiming Yang

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) often employ safety alignment methods to resist harmful instructions. However, recent research shows that maliciously fine-tuning these LLMs on harmful data can easily bypass these safeguards. To…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Zixuan Chen , Weikai Lu , Xin Lin , Ziqian Zeng

Fine-tuning large language models often undermines their safety alignment, a problem further amplified by harmful fine-tuning attacks in which adversarial data removes safeguards and induces unsafe behaviors. We propose SPARD, a defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Shuhao Chen , Weisen Jiang , Yeqi Gong , Shengda Luo , Chengxiang Zhuo , Zang Li , James T. Kwok , Yu Zhang

Instruction fine-tuning has emerged as a critical technique for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific applications. However, recent studies have highlighted significant security vulnerabilities in fine-tuned LLMs. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Jiawei Cao , Ming Ma , Danyang Zhao , Shuren Qi , Fenglei Fan , Ting Liu , Bing Qin

Ensuring robust safety alignment while preserving utility is critical for the reliable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current techniques fundamentally suffer from intertwined deficiencies: insufficient robustness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Birong Pan , Mayi Xu , Qiankun Pi , Jianhao Chen , Yuanyuan Zhu , Ming Zhong , Tieyun Qian

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, but their ability to generate harmful content raises serious safety concerns. Although safety alignment techniques are often applied during pre-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Chengcan Wu , Zhixin Zhang , Zeming Wei , Yihao Zhang , Xiaokun Luan , Meng Sun

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing a wide range of general inquiries and tasks. Despite this, fine-tuning aligned LLMs on smaller, domain-specific datasets, critical to adapting them to specialized…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Guanlin Li , Kangjie Chen , Shangwei Guo , Jie Zhang , Han Qiu , Chao Zhang , Guoyin Wang , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li

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

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked widespread concerns about their safety. Recent work demonstrates that safety alignment of LLMs can be easily removed by fine-tuning with a few adversarially chosen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Samuele Poppi , Zheng-Xin Yong , Yifei He , Bobbie Chern , Han Zhao , Aobo Yang , Jianfeng Chi

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sadia Asif , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Hao Du , Shang Liu , Lele Zheng , Yang Cao , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Lei Chen

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

Safety alignment is crucial to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave in ways that align with human preferences and prevent harmful actions during inference. However, recent studies show that the alignment can be easily compromised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 ShengYun Peng , Pin-Yu Chen , Matthew Hull , Duen Horng Chau

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on telecom datasets is a common practice to adapt general-purpose models to the telecom domain. However, little attention has been paid to how this process may compromise model safety. Recent…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Aladin Djuhera , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Farhan Ahmed , Syed Zawad , Fernando Koch , Walid Saad , Holger Boche

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenjuan Li , Yitao Liu , Runze Chen , Rajkumar Buyya