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The integration of large language models (LLMs) into cyber security applications presents both opportunities and critical safety risks. We introduce CyberLLMInstruct, a dataset of 54,928 pseudo-malicious instruction-response pairs spanning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Adel ElZemity , Budi Arief , Shujun Li

As the number of large language models (LLMs) released to the public grows, there is a pressing need to understand the safety implications associated with these models learning from third-party custom finetuning data. We explore the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jiachen Zhao , Zhun Deng , David Madras , James Zou , Mengye Ren

Ensuring Large Language Model (LLM) safety is crucial, yet the lack of a clear understanding about safety mechanisms hinders the development of precise and reliable methodologies for safety intervention across diverse tasks. To better…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Weiwei Qi , Zefeng Wu , Tianhang Zheng , Zikang Zhang , Xiaojun Jia , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

The introduction of large language models (LLMs) has enhanced automation in software engineering tasks, including in Model Driven Engineering (MDE). However, using general-purpose LLMs for domain modeling has its limitations. One approach…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Vladyslav Bulhakov , Giordano d'Aloisio , Claudio Di Sipio , Antinisca Di Marco , Davide Di Ruscio

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, the risk of generating harmful or toxic content remains a central challenge. Post-hoc alignment methods are brittle: once unsafe patterns are learned during…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Gabriel J. Perin , Runjin Chen , Xuxi Chen , Nina S. T. Hirata , Zhangyang Wang , Junyuan Hong

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning on insecure code data can trigger an emergent misalignment (EMA) phenomenon, where models generate malicious responses even to prompts unrelated to the original insecure code-writing task. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Erum Mushtaq , Anil Ramakrishna , Satyapriya Krishna , Sattvik Sahai , Prasoon Goyal , Kai-Wei Chang , Tao Zhang , Rahul Gupta

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated progress toward artificial general intelligence, yet their potential to generate harmful content poses critical safety challenges. Existing alignment methods often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Kehua Feng , Keyan Ding , Yuhao Wang , Menghan Li , Fanjunduo Wei , Xinda Wang , Qiang Zhang , Huajun Chen

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

Language models, characterized by their black-box nature, often hallucinate and display sensitivity to input perturbations, causing concerns about trust. To enhance trust, it is imperative to gain a comprehensive understanding of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Vatsal Gupta , Pranshu Pandya , Tushar Kataria , Vivek Gupta , Dan Roth

This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yangyang Guo , Ziwei Xu , Si Liu , Zhiming Zheng , Mohan Kankanhalli

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

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently become a critical objective of model developers. In response, a growing body of work has been investigating how safety alignment can be bypassed through various jailbreaking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Jason Vega , Junsheng Huang , Gaokai Zhang , Hangoo Kang , Minjia Zhang , Gagandeep Singh

Understanding and addressing potential safety alignment risks in large language models (LLMs) is critical for ensuring their safe and trustworthy deployment. In this paper, we highlight an insidious safety threat: a compromised LLM can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Guangnian Wan , Xinyin Ma , Gongfan Fang , Xinchao Wang

Ensuring consistent safety across multiple languages remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). We introduce Soteria, a lightweight yet powerful strategy that locates and minimally adjusts the "functional heads" most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Somnath Banerjee , Sayan Layek , Pratyush Chatterjee , Animesh Mukherjee , Rima Hazra

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

The safety mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) exhibit notable fragility, as even fine-tuning on datasets without harmful content may still undermine their safety capabilities. Meanwhile, existing safety alignment methods…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Guanghao Zhou , Panjia Qiu , Cen Chen , Hongyu Li , Mingyuan Chu , Xin Zhang , Jun Zhou

Modern optimizers like Adam and Muon are central to training large language models, but their reliance on first- and second-order momenta introduces significant memory overhead, which constrains scalability and computational efficiency. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Zhengbo Wang , Jian Liang , Ran He , Zilei Wang , Tieniu Tan

As large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted, new safety issues and policies emerge, to which existing safety classifiers do not generalize well. If we have only observed a few examples of violations of a new safety rule, how can we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Ananth Balashankar , Xiao Ma , Aradhana Sinha , Ahmad Beirami , Yao Qin , Jilin Chen , Alex Beutel

Safety fine-tuning of language models typically requires a curated adversarial dataset. We take a different approach: score each candidate prompt's difficulty by how often the target model's own rollouts are judged harmful, then fine-tune…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Prakhar Gupta , Garv Shah , Donghua Zhang