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Related papers: Objective Matters: Fine-Tuning Objectives Shape Sa…

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Instruction-following language models are trained to be helpful and safe, yet their safety behavior can deteriorate under benign fine-tuning and worsen under adversarial updates. Existing defenses often offer limited protection or force a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jyotin Goel , Souvik Maji , Pratik Mazumder

Deep learning models operating in the image domain are vulnerable to small input perturbations. For years, robustness to such perturbations was pursued by training models from scratch (i.e., with random initializations) using specialized…

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yanbo Wang , Jiyang Guan , Jian Liang , Ran He

One of the key technologies for the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) is preference alignment. However, a notable side effect of preference alignment is poor calibration: while the pre-trained models are typically well-calibrated,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jiancong Xiao , Bojian Hou , Zhanliang Wang , Ruochen Jin , Qi Long , Weijie J. Su , Li Shen

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Ziqi Dai , Xin Zhang , Mingxin Li , Yanzhao Zhang , Dingkun Long , Pengjun Xie , Meishan Zhang , Wenjie Li , Min Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) for public use require continuous pre-training to remain up-to-date with the latest data. The models also need to be fine-tuned with specific instructions to maintain their ability to follow instructions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ishan Jindal , Chandana Badrinath , Pranjal Bharti , Lakkidi Vinay , Sachin Dev Sharma

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in everyday applications, ensuring their alignment with the diverse preferences of individual users has become a critical challenge. Currently deployed approaches typically assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Katarzyna Kobalczyk , Claudio Fanconi , Hao Sun , Mihaela van der Schaar

This paper investigates supervised fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) to improve their pedagogical alignment in computing education, addressing concerns that LLMs may hinder learning outcomes. The project utilised a proprietary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Alexandra Vassar , Jake Renzella , Emily Ross , Andrew Taylor

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

Current vision large language models (VLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities yet are prone to generate harmful content and are vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. Our initial analysis finds that this is due to the presence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yongshuo Zong , Ondrej Bohdal , Tingyang Yu , Yongxin Yang , Timothy Hospedales

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Haoran Yang , Yumeng Zhang , Jiaqi Xu , Hongyuan Lu , Pheng Ann Heng , Wai Lam

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on human preferences, typically through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has proven successful in enhancing their capabilities. However, ensuring the safety of LLMs during…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Wenxuan Zhang , Philip H. S. Torr , Mohamed Elhoseiny , Adel Bibi

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely fragile, as fine-tuning on a small number of benign samples can erase safety behaviors learned from millions of preference examples. Existing studies attempt to explain this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiao Wang , Yifei Zhang , YongKang Liu , Xiaocui Yang , Zihan Wang , Shi Feng , Daling Wang

Machine unlearning offers a promising solution to privacy and safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) by selectively removing targeted knowledge while preserving utility. However, current methods are highly sensitive to downstream…

We address the problem of making a pre-trained reinforcement learning (RL) policy safety-aware by incorporating cost constraints without retraining it from scratch. While costs could be numerically encoded, we assume a more general setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Richa Verma , Bavish Kulur , Sanjay Chawla , Balaraman Ravindran

Instruction tuning has proven effective in enhancing Large Language Models' (LLMs) performance on downstream tasks. However, real-world fine-tuning faces inherent conflicts between model providers' intellectual property protection, clients'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Haonan Shi , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

While large language models (LLMs) often adopt finetuning to unlock their capabilities for downstream applications, our understanding on the inductive biases (especially the scaling properties) of different finetuning methods is still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Biao Zhang , Zhongtao Liu , Colin Cherry , Orhan Firat

As a relative quality comparison of model responses, human and Large Language Model (LLM) preferences serve as common alignment goals in model fine-tuning and criteria in evaluation. Yet, these preferences merely reflect broad tendencies,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Junlong Li , Fan Zhou , Shichao Sun , Yikai Zhang , Hai Zhao , Pengfei Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the unique capability to understand and generate human-like text from input queries. When fine-tuned, these models show enhanced performance on domain-specific queries. OpenAI highlights the process of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Scott Barnett , Zac Brannelly , Stefanus Kurniawan , Sheng Wong

Alignment, endowing a pre-trained Large language model (LLM) with the ability to follow instructions, is crucial for its real-world applications. Conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods formalize it as causal language modeling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Yuchen Fan , Yuzhong Hong , Qiushi Wang , Junwei Bao , Hongfei Jiang , Yang Song