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Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is a common practice to adapt generalist models to specialized domains. However, recent studies show that fine-tuning can erode safety alignment, causing LLMs to respond to harmful or unethical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Aladin Djuhera , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Farhan Ahmed , Syed Zawad , Holger Boche

Although large language models (LLMs) achieve effective safety alignment at the time of release, they still face various safety challenges. A key issue is that fine-tuning often compromises the safety alignment of LLMs. To address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Di Wu , Xin Lu , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capabilities but suffer sophisticated jailbreak vulnerabilities. Fundamentally, aligning LVLMs is not just a safety challenge but a problem of economic efficiency. Current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Teng Ma , Hongyi Zhang

Safety alignment in language models operates through two mechanistically distinct systems: refusal neurons that gate whether harmful knowledge is expressed, and concept neurons that encode the harmful knowledge itself. By targeting a single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hamid Kazemi , Atoosa Chegini , Maria Safi

The current safeguard mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are indeed susceptible to jailbreak attacks, making them inherently fragile. Even the process of fine-tuning on apparently benign data for downstream tasks can jeopardize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xin Yi , Shunfan Zheng , Linlin Wang , Xiaoling Wang , Liang He

In this paper, we argue that current safety alignment research efforts for large language models are hindered by many intertwined sources of noise, such as small datasets, methodological inconsistencies, and unreliable evaluation setups.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tim Beyer , Sophie Xhonneux , Simon Geisler , Gauthier Gidel , Leo Schwinn , Stephan Günnemann

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Umberto Michieli , Fabio Pizzati , Philip Torr , Adel Bibi , Bernard Ghanem , Mete Ozay

Generalizable alignment is a core challenge for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) safely in real-world NLP applications. Current alignment methods, including Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often fail to guarantee…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Jaymari Chua , Chen Wang , Lina Yao

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but also present risks such as biased content generation and privacy issues. One of the current alignment techniques includes principle-driven integration, but it faces challenges…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yi Luo , Zhenghao Lin , Yuhao Zhang , Jiashuo Sun , Chen Lin , Chengjin Xu , Xiangdong Su , Yelong Shen , Jian Guo , Yeyun Gong

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

The safety alignment ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is prone to be degraded by the integration of the vision module compared to its LLM backbone. We investigate this phenomenon, dubbed as ''safety alignment degradation'' in this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Qin Liu , Chao Shang , Ling Liu , Nikolaos Pappas , Jie Ma , Neha Anna John , Srikanth Doss , Lluis Marquez , Miguel Ballesteros , Yassine Benajiba

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

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly attracting attention in various applications. Nonetheless, there is a growing concern as some users attempt to exploit these models for malicious purposes, including the synthesis of controlled…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Chongwen Zhao , Yutong Ke , Kaizhu Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma

Safety alignment is crucial to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave in ways that align with human preferences and prevent harmful actions during inference. However, recent studies show that the alignment can be easily compromised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 ShengYun Peng , Pin-Yu Chen , Matthew Hull , Duen Horng Chau

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

Fine-tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to specific domains, but often compromises their previously established safety alignment. To mitigate the degradation of model safety during fine-tuning, we introduce LookAhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Kangwei Liu , Mengru Wang , Yujie Luo , Lin Yuan , Mengshu Sun , Lei Liang , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou , Bryan Hooi , Shumin Deng

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming the robotics domain by enabling robots to comprehend and execute natural language instructions. The cornerstone benefits of LLM include processing textual data from technical manuals,…

Despite the impressive performance of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), they often require fine-tuning or post-training to excel at specific tasks. For instance, large reasoning models (LRMs), such as the DeepSeek-R1 series,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Mingjie Li , Wai Man Si , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang , Yisen Wang