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Related papers: Gradient Surgery for Safe LLM Fine-Tuning

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Recent studies have uncovered a troubling vulnerability in the fine-tuning stage of large language models (LLMs): even fine-tuning on entirely benign datasets can lead to a significant increase in the harmfulness of LLM outputs. Building on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zihan Guan , Mengxuan Hu , Ronghang Zhu , Sheng Li , Anil Vullikanti

Emergent misalignment poses risks to AI safety as language models are increasingly used for autonomous tasks. In this paper, we present a population of large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on insecure datasets spanning 11 diverse…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Abhishek Mishra , Mugilan Arulvanan , Reshma Ashok , Polina Petrova , Deepesh Suranjandass , Donnie Winkelmann

The existing safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is found fragile and could be easily attacked through different strategies, such as through fine-tuning on a few harmful examples or manipulating the prefix of the generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Chak Tou Leong , Yi Cheng , Kaishuai Xu , Jian Wang , Hanlin Wang , Wenjie Li

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing attention. Due to the heterogeneity of their input features, they face significant challenges in terms of jailbreak defenses. Current defense methods rely on costly fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xinyi Zeng , Xue Yang , Jingyuan Zhang , Huanqian Yan , Xiang Chen , Kaiwen Wei , Hankun Kang , Yu Tian

The advent of large language models (LLMs) in the education sector has provided impetus to automate grading short answer questions. LLMs make evaluating short answers very efficient, thus addressing issues like staff shortage. However, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Niharika Dadu , Harsh Vardhan Singh , Romi Banerjee

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for answering user queries, yet they remain highly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing guardrail methods typically rely on internal features or textual responses to detect malicious…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zikai Zhang , Rui Hu , Olivera Kotevska , Jiahao Xu

With the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs), enterprises have been able to rapidly develop proof-of-concepts and prototypes. As a result, there is a growing need to implement robust guardrails that monitor, quantize and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Aaron Zheng , Mansi Rana , Andreas Stolcke

Most prior safety research of large language models (LLMs) has focused on enhancing the alignment of LLMs to better suit the safety requirements of humans. However, internalizing such safeguard features into larger models brought challenges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Ohjoon Kwon , Donghyeon Jeon , Nayoung Choi , Gyu-Hwung Cho , Changbong Kim , Hyunwoo Lee , Inho Kang , Sun Kim , Taiwoo Park

Fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models is widely used for personalization and adaptation for new domains. In this paper, we identify a critical vulnerability of fine-tuning: safety alignment methods designed to filter harmful content…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Sanghyun Kim , Moonseok Choi , Jinwoo Shin , Juho Lee

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) is one of the prevalently studied subcategories of trial-and-error-based methods with the intention to be deployed on real-world systems. In safe RL, the goal is to maximize reward performance while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Homayoun Honari , Amir Mehdi Soufi Enayati , Mehran Ghafarian Tamizi , Homayoun Najjaran

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

Software security vulnerabilities allow attackers to perform malicious activities to disrupt software operations. Recent Transformer-based language models have significantly advanced vulnerability detection, surpassing the capabilities of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Aidan Z. H. Yang , Haoye Tian , He Ye , Ruben Martins , Claire Le Goues

The emergence of vision language models (VLMs) comes with increased safety concerns, as the incorporation of multiple modalities heightens vulnerability to attacks. Although VLMs can be built upon LLMs that have textual safety alignment, it…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Qin Liu , Fei Wang , Chaowei Xiao , Muhao Chen

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as educational agents for automatic short answer grading (ASAG) in real-world educational environments, significantly boosting assessment efficiency and scalability. However, when these…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xueyi Li , Zhuoneng Zhou , Zitao Liu , Yongdong Wu

Recent studies show that the safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) can be easily compromised even by seemingly non-adversarial fine-tuning. To preserve safety alignment during fine-tuning, a widely used strategy is to jointly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Zhouxiang Fang , Jiawei Zhou , Hanjie Chen

This paper presents a gradient-informed fine-tuning method for large language models under few-shot conditions. The goal is to enhance task adaptability and training stability when data is limited. The method builds on a base loss function…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Hongye Zheng , Yichen Wang , Ray Pan , Guiran Liu , Binrong Zhu , Hanlu Zhang

Fine-tuning language models is commonly believed to inevitably harm their safety, i.e., refusing to respond to harmful user requests, even when using harmless datasets, thus requiring additional safety measures. We challenge this belief…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Minseon Kim , Jin Myung Kwak , Lama Alssum , Bernard Ghanem , Philip Torr , David Krueger , Fazl Barez , Adel Bibi

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves either full fine-tuning, which updates all model parameters, or Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), which adjusts a small subset of parameters. However, both approaches have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Shaocong Ma , Peiran Yu , Heng Huang

Vision-Language adaptation (VL adaptation) transforms Large Language Models (LLMs) into Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for multimodal tasks, but this process often compromises the inherent safety capabilities embedded in the original…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Seongyun Lee , Geewook Kim , Jiyeon Kim , Hyunji Lee , Hoyeon Chang , Sue Hyun Park , Minjoon Seo