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Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have gained significant popularity as foundation models, with numerous fine-tuning methods developed to enhance performance on downstream tasks. However, due to their inherent vulnerability and…

In this work, we present a simple yet theoretically motivated improvement to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for the Large Language Model (LLM), addressing its limited generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). Through…

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

Contextual priming, where earlier stimuli covertly bias later judgments, offers an unexplored attack surface for large language models (LLMs). We uncover a contextual priming vulnerability in which the previous response in the dialogue can…

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are prolonged, stealthy intrusions by skilled adversaries that compromise high-value systems to steal data or disrupt operations. Reconstructing complete attack chains from massive, heterogeneous logs is…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has played a central role in the recent surge of LLMs' math abilities by enabling self-improvement through binary verifier signals. In contrast, Supervised Learning (SL) is rarely considered for such…

Although safely enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tackling various complex tasks in a zero-shot manner, they remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks, particularly the unknown jailbreak attack. To…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into IT infrastructures, where they process user data according to predefined instructions. However, conventional LLMs remain vulnerable to prompt injection, where malicious users…

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries embed a hidden backdoor trigger during the training process for malicious prediction manipulation. These attacks pose great threats to the applications of…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. This paradigm provides a cold-start for RL exploration, avoiding the inefficiency of pure RL where…

Packing for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in autoregressive models involves concatenating data points of varying lengths until reaching the designed maximum length to facilitate GPU processing. However, randomly concatenating data points can…

Customized Large Language Model (LLM) agents face a critical security threat from black-box instruction backdoors, where malicious behaviors are covertly injected through hidden system instructions. Although existing prompt-based defenses…

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, we identify a critical trade-off: while unconstrained RFT achieves strong reasoning performance, it…

A popular class of defenses against prompt injection attacks on large language models (LLMs) relies on fine-tuning to separate instructions and data, so that the LLM does not follow instructions that might be present with data. We evaluate…

Improving time-to-first-token (TTFT) is an essentially important objective in modern large language model (LLM) inference engines. Optimizing TTFT directly results in higher maximal QPS and meets the requirements of many critical…

Large language models can now be personalised efficiently at scale using parameter efficient finetuning methods (PEFTs), but serving user-specific PEFTs harms throughput, even with specialised kernels and memory management techniques. This…

Backdoor data poisoning, inserted within instruction examples used to fine-tune a foundation Large Language Model (LLM) for downstream tasks (\textit{e.g.,} sentiment prediction), is a serious security concern due to the evasive nature of…

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning have shown that sophisticated behaviors such as planning and self-reflection can emerge through reinforcement learning (RL). However, despite these successes, RL in its current form…

Despite being widely applied due to their exceptional capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. These attacks introduce targeted vulnerabilities into LLMs by poisoning training samples…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio…