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Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often compromises safety alignment, even when using parameter-efficient methods like LoRA. In this work, we uncover a notable property: fine-tuned models preserve the geometric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Thong Bach , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

Current Large Language Models (LLMs), even those tuned for safety and alignment, are susceptible to jailbreaking. Some have found that just further fine-tuning an aligned model with benign data (i.e., data without harmful content)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Luxi He , Mengzhou Xia , Peter Henderson

Safety alignment of large language models remains brittle under domain shift and noisy preference supervision. Most existing robust alignment methods focus on uncertainty in alignment data, while overlooking optimization-induced fragility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Yonghui Yang , Wenjian Tao , Jilong Liu , Xingyu Zhu , Junfeng Fang , Weibiao Huang , Le Wu , Richang Hong , Tat-Sent Chua

Fine-tuning is an essential and pervasive functionality for applying large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, it has the potential to substantially degrade safety alignment, e.g., by greatly increasing susceptibility to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Jiawen Zhang , Yangfan Hu , Kejia Chen , Lipeng He , Jiachen Ma , Jian Lou , Dan Li , Jian Liu , Xiaohu Yang , Ruoxi Jia

Continual learning (CL) studies how models acquire tasks sequentially while retaining previously learned knowledge. Despite substantial progress in benchmarking CL methods, comparative evaluations typically keep the fine-tuning regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Paul-Tiberiu Iordache , Elena Burceanu

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, but their ability to generate harmful content raises serious safety concerns. Although safety alignment techniques are often applied during pre-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Chengcan Wu , Zhixin Zhang , Zeming Wei , Yihao Zhang , Xiaokun Luan , Meng Sun

Context: In the fast-paced evolution of software development, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable tools for tasks such as code generation, completion, analysis, and bug fixing. Ensuring the robustness of these models…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yang Liu , Armstrong Foundjem , Xingfang Wu , Heng Li , Foutse Khomh

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Xiangyu Qi , Yi Zeng , Tinghao Xie , Pin-Yu Chen , Ruoxi Jia , Prateek Mittal , Peter Henderson

Fine-tuning has emerged as a critical process in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific downstream tasks, enabling these models to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various domains. However, the fine-tuning process…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Hao Du , Shang Liu , Lele Zheng , Yang Cao , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Lei Chen

Instruction fine-tuning has recently emerged as a promising approach for improving the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on new tasks. This technique has shown particular strength in improving the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Jiuding Sun , Chantal Shaib , Byron C. Wallace

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit cognitive biases -- systematic tendencies of irrational decision-making, similar to those seen in humans. Prior work has found that these biases vary across models and can be amplified by instruction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Itay Itzhak , Yonatan Belinkov , Gabriel Stanovsky

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Joel Jang , Seungone Kim , Seonghyeon Ye , Doyoung Kim , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Moontae Lee , Kyungjae Lee , Minjoon Seo

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is essential for safe and useful LLMs. Previous works mainly adopt reinforcement learning (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO) with human feedback for alignment.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Tianci Xue , Ziqi Wang , Heng Ji

Large visual language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated excellent instruction-following capabilities, yet remain vulnerable to stealthy backdoor attacks when finetuned using contaminated data. Existing backdoor defense techniques are usually…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Yuan Xun , Siyuan Liang , Xiaojun Jia , Xinwei Liu , Xiaochun Cao

Within the realm of software engineering, specialized tasks on code, such as program repair, present unique challenges, necessitating fine-tuning Large language models~(LLMs) to unlock state-of-the-art performance. Fine-tuning approaches…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Boyang Yang , Haoye Tian , Jiadong Ren , Hongyu Zhang , Jacques Klein , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé , Claire Le Goues , Shunfu Jin

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

With the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), more customization is needed to ensure privacy-preserving and safe generation. We address this objective from two critical aspects: unlearning of sensitive information and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Fatmazohra Rezkellah , Ramzi Dakhmouche

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain applications in fields such as materials science and engineering depends on the development of fine-tuning strategies that adapt models for specialized, technical capabilities. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Wei Lu , Rachel K. Luu , Markus J. Buehler

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with limited data poses a practical challenge in low-resource languages, specialized domains, and constrained deployment settings. While pre-trained LLMs provide strong foundations, effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Marton Szep , Daniel Rueckert , Rüdiger von Eisenhart-Rothe , Florian Hinterwimmer

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being applied in a wide array of settings, well beyond the typical language-oriented use cases. In particular, LLMs are increasingly used as a plug-and-play method for fitting data and generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Hejia Liu , Mochen Yang , Gediminas Adomavicius