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Recent research demonstrates that the nascent fine-tuning-as-a-service business model exposes serious safety concerns: fine-tuning with a few harmful data uploaded from the users can compromise the safety alignment of the model. The attack,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu

Fine-tuning-as-a-service introduces a threat to Large Language Models' safety when service providers fine-tune their models on poisoned user-submitted datasets, a process known as harmful fine-tuning attacks. In this work, we show that by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Quoc Minh Nguyen , Trung Le , Jing Wu , Anh Tuan Bui , Mehrtash Harandi

Safety aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks -- a few harmful data mixed in the fine-tuning dataset can break the LLMs's safety alignment. While several defenses have been proposed, our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Tiansheng Huang , Gautam Bhattacharya , Pratik Joshi , Josh Kimball , Ling Liu

Harmful fine-tuning attack poses serious safety concerns for large language models' fine-tuning-as-a-service. While existing defenses have been proposed to mitigate the issue, their performances are still far away from satisfactory, and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary capabilities in understanding complex contexts and performing a wide range of tasks. However, LLMs can also answer questions that are unethical or harmful, raising concerns about…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Kang Yang , Guanhong Tao , Xun Chen , Jun Xu

Harmful fine-tuning attack introduces significant security risks to the fine-tuning services. Main-stream defenses aim to vaccinate the model such that the later harmful fine-tuning attack is less effective. However, our evaluation results…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Yibo Wang , Tiansheng Huang , Li Shen , Huanjin Yao , Haotian Luo , Rui Liu , Naiqiang Tan , Jiaxing Huang , Dacheng Tao

Recent research shows that fine-tuning on benign instruction-following data can inadvertently undo the safety alignment process and increase a model's propensity to comply with harmful queries. While instruction-following fine-tuning is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Francisco Eiras , Aleksandar Petrov , Philip H. S. Torr , M. Pawan Kumar , Adel Bibi

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

Fine-tuning-as-a-Service introduces a critical vulnerability where a few malicious examples mixed into the user's fine-tuning dataset can compromise the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While a recognized paradigm frames…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Biao Yi , Jiahao Li , Baolei Zhang , Lihai Nie , Tong Li , Tiansheng Huang , Zheli Liu

Attention sinks -- tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass -- are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Fangzheng Wu , Brian Summa

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

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

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) enables user-specific customization but introduces critical safety risks: even a few harmful examples can compromise safety alignment. A common mitigation strategy is to update the model more strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 ShengYun Peng , Pin-Yu Chen , Jianfeng Chi , Seongmin Lee , Duen Horng Chau

Despite the prevalence of the attention sink phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs), where initial tokens disproportionately monopolize attention scores, its structural origins remain elusive. This work provides a \textit{mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Siquan Li , Kaiqi Jiang , Jiacheng Sun , Tianyang Hu

Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 David Kaczér , Magnus Jørgenvåg , Clemens Vetter , Esha Afzal , Robin Haselhorst , Lucie Flek , Florian Mai

Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks unpredictably degrades safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content and developers have no adversarial intent. We show that the prevailing explanation, that…

Large language models frequently exhibit hallucinations: fluent and confident outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported by the input context. While recent hallucination detection methods have explored various features derived from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jakub Binkowski , Kamil Adamczewski , Tomasz Kajdanowicz

Large language models are typically trained on vast amounts of data during the pre-training phase, which may include some potentially harmful information. Fine-tuning attacks can exploit this by prompting the model to reveal such…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Zhiyuan Xu , Joseph Gardiner , Sana Belguith

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

Robust alignment guardrails for large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important with their widespread application. In contrast to previous studies, we demonstrate that inference-time activation interventions can bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Paul Darm , Annalisa Riccardi
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