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Fine-tuning on task-specific data to boost downstream performance is a crucial step for leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). However, previous studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning the models on several adversarial samples or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Han Shen , Pin-Yu Chen , Payel Das , Tianyi Chen

Despite their widespread use, large language models (LLMs) are known to hallucinate incorrect information and be poorly calibrated. This makes the uncertainty quantification of these models of critical importance, especially in high-stakes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Colin Samplawski , Adam D. Cobb , Manoj Acharya , Ramneet Kaur , Susmit Jha

LLMs increasingly require surgical model editing to enhance domain-specific capabilities without incurring the computational cost or catastrophic forgetting associated with full fine-tuning. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Li Lei , Madalina Ciobanu , Qingqing Mao , Ritankar Das

Fine-tuning safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) can substantially compromise their safety. Previous approaches require many safety samples or calibration sets, which not only incur significant computational overhead during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jiawen Zhang , Lipeng He , Kejia Chen , Jian Lou , Jian Liu , Xiaohu Yang , Ruoxi Jia

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on additional datasets is often necessary to optimize them for specific downstream tasks. However, existing safety alignment measures, which restrict harmful behavior during inference, are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Minjun Zhu , Linyi Yang , Yifan Wei , Ningyu Zhang , Yue Zhang

Current safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) face two key challenges: (1) under-generalization, which leaves models vulnerable to novel jailbreak attacks, and (2) over-alignment, which leads to the excessive refusal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yutao Mou , Yuxiao Luo , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose language model representations into a sparse set of linear latent vectors. Recent works have improved SAEs using language model gradients, but these techniques require many expensive backward passes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Matthew Chen , Joshua Engels , Max Tegmark

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 alignment is critical for deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications, yet most existing approaches rely on large human-annotated datasets and static red-teaming benchmarks that are costly, difficult to scale,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Punyajoy Saha , Sudipta Halder , Debjyoti Mondal , Subhadarshi Panda

Large language models (LLMs) show inherent brittleness in their safety mechanisms, as evidenced by their susceptibility to jailbreaking and even non-malicious fine-tuning. This study explores this brittleness of safety alignment by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Boyi Wei , Kaixuan Huang , Yangsibo Huang , Tinghao Xie , Xiangyu Qi , Mengzhou Xia , Prateek Mittal , Mengdi Wang , Peter Henderson

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) has been gaining increasing attention. However, current safety-aligned LLMs suffer from the fragile and imbalanced safety mechanisms, which can still be induced to generate unsafe responses,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Weixiang Zhao , Yulin Hu , Zhuojun Li , Yang Deng , Jiahe Guo , Xingyu Sui , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enhances adaptability while reducing computational costs. However, fine-tuning can compromise safety alignment, even with benign data, increasing susceptibility to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Shuang Ao , Yi Dong , Jinwei Hu , Sarvapali Ramchurn

Large Language Models (LLMs) with safe-alignment training are powerful instruments with robust language comprehension capabilities. These models typically undergo meticulous alignment procedures involving human feedback to ensure the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Maithili Joshi , Palash Nandi , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) is a powerful method for improving task-specific performance, but it can inadvertently lead to a phenomenon where models generate harmful responses when faced with malicious prompts.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Satya Swaroop Gudipudi , Sreeram Vipparla , Harpreet Singh , Shashwat Goel , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

Recent developments in Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities have brought great potential but also posed new risks. For example, LLMs with knowledge of bioweapons, advanced chemistry, or cyberattacks could cause violence if placed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Matthew Khoriaty , Andrii Shportko , Gustavo Mercier , Zach Wood-Doughty

Mechanistic interpretability reveals that safety-critical behaviors (e.g., alignment, jailbreak, backdoor) in Large Language Models (LLMs) are grounded in specialized functional components. However, existing safety attribution methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Miao Yu , Siyuan Fu , Moayad Aloqaily , Zhenhong Zhou , Safa Otoum , Xing fan , Kun Wang , Yufei Guo , Qingsong Wen

While large language models (LLMs) such as Llama-2 or GPT-4 have shown impressive zero-shot performance, fine-tuning is still necessary to enhance their performance for customized datasets, domain-specific tasks, or other private needs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Chia-Yi Hsu , Yu-Lin Tsai , Chih-Hsun Lin , Pin-Yu Chen , Chia-Mu Yu , Chun-Ying Huang

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

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Zouying Cao , Yifei Yang , Hai Zhao

Intermediate layers of large language models (LLMs) best predict human brain responses to language, one of the most robust findings in computational neurolinguistics, yet why remains mechanistically unexplained. We address this gap by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu