Related papers: The Devil in the Details: Emergent Misalignment, F…
Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is primarily evaluated under open-ended generation, where models can mitigate risk by refusing to respond. In contrast, many real-world applications place LLMs in structured decision-making…
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…
Machine learning models, including state-of-the-art deep neural networks, are vulnerable to small perturbations that cause unexpected classification errors. This unexpected lack of robustness raises fundamental questions about their…
Recent advancements in fine-tuning proprietary language models enable customized applications across various domains but also introduce two major challenges: high resource demands and security risks. Regarding resource demands, recent work…
Adversarial training suffers from robust overfitting, a phenomenon where the robust test accuracy starts to decrease during training. In this paper, we focus on both heuristics-driven and data-driven augmentations as a means to reduce…
Large Language Models are routinely compressed via post-training quantization to reduce inference costs and memory footprint for cloud and edge deployment, yet the impact of this compression on model quality remains poorly understood.…
The safety alignment of current Large Language Models (LLMs) is vulnerable. Relatively simple attacks, or even benign fine-tuning, can jailbreak aligned models. We argue that many of these vulnerabilities are related to a shared underlying…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current…
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful…
Neural networks are vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations. Existing literature largely focused on understanding and mitigating the vulnerability of learned models. In this paper, we demonstrate an intriguing phenomenon about the…
Semantic leakage is a phenomenon recently introduced by Gonen et al. (2024). It refers to a situation in which associations learnt from the training data emerge in language model generations in an unexpected and sometimes undesired way.…
Prompt injection attacks pose significant risks to language model safety, yet existing defenses are typically evaluated using classification performance. We show that high detection performance does not imply representational robustness.…
From the perspective of content safety issues, alignment has shown to limit large language models' (LLMs) harmful content generation. This intentional method of reinforcing models to not respond to certain user inputs seem to be present in…
Weight-perturbation evolution strategies (ES) can fine-tune billion-parameter language models with surprisingly small populations (e.g., $N\!\approx\!30$), contradicting classical zeroth-order curse-of-dimensionality intuition. We also…
Model providers increasingly release open weights or allow users to fine-tune foundation models through APIs. Although these models are safety-aligned before release, their safeguards can often be removed by fine-tuning on harmful data.…
Although machine learning models typically experience a drop in performance on out-of-distribution data, accuracies on in- versus out-of-distribution data are widely observed to follow a single linear trend when evaluated across a testbed…
Data-parallel (DP) training with synchronous all-reduce is a dominant paradigm for full-parameter fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). While parameter synchronization guarantees numerical equivalence of model weights after each…
Diffusion models have emerged as the leading paradigm in generative modeling, excelling in various applications. Despite their success, these models often misalign with human intentions and generate results with undesired properties or even…
Weak-to-strong alignment offers a promising route to scalable supervision, but it can fail when a strong model becomes confidently wrong on examples that lie in the weak teacher's blind spots. Understanding such failures requires going…
Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on custom…