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Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into educational applications. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak and fine-tuning attacks, which can compromise safety alignment and lead to harmful outputs. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Xin Yi , Yue Li , Dongsheng Shi , Linlin Wang , Xiaoling Wang , Liang He

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shuo Yang , Qihui Zhang , Yuyang Liu , Xiaojun Jia , Kunpeng Ning , Jiayu Yao , Jigang Wang , Hailiang Dai , Yibing Song , Li Yuan

Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vulnerable to adversarial misuse. While prior work has shown that safety-relevant features are encoded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sadia Asif , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

Prior work shows that fine-tuning aligned models on benign data degrades safety in text and vision modalities, and that proximity to harmful content in representation space predicts which samples cause the most damage. However, existing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jaechul Roh , Amir Houmansadr

Large language models are shown to present privacy risks through memorization of training data, and several recent works have studied such risks for the pre-training phase. Little attention, however, has been given to the fine-tuning phase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Fatemehsadat Mireshghallah , Archit Uniyal , Tianhao Wang , David Evans , Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

Recent defenses for safeguarding open-weight large language models (LLMs) are intended to prevent adversarial usage. Underlying these defenses is an assumption that new harmful behavior is learned through fine-tuning rather than elicited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kevin Kuo , Chhavi Yadav , Virginia Smith

Fine-tuning large language models on new data improves task performance but degrades capabilities learned during pretraining, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods mitigate this by modifying the fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Parjanya Prajakta Prashant , Jiongli Zhu , Aldan Creo , Babak Salimi

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) incur high inference cost due to iterative denoising, motivating efficient pruning. Existing pruning heuristics largely inherited from autoregressive (AR) LLMs, typically preserve attention sink tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Aidar Myrzakhan , Tianyi Li , Bowei Guo , Shengkun Tang , Zhiqiang Shen

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

Instruction fine-tuning has emerged as a critical technique for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific applications. However, recent studies have highlighted significant security vulnerabilities in fine-tuned LLMs. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Jiawei Cao , Ming Ma , Danyang Zhao , Shuren Qi , Fenglei Fan , Ting Liu , Bing Qin

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to hallucinate, whereby they generate plausible but inaccurate text. This phenomenon poses significant risks in critical applications, such as medicine or law, necessitating robust hallucination…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Benedict Aaron Tjandra , Muhammed Razzak , Jannik Kossen , Kunal Handa , Yarin Gal

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models can be viewed as an off-policy learning problem, where expert demonstrations come from a fixed behavior policy while training aims to optimize a target policy. Importance sampling is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Shiwan Zhao , Xuyang Zhao , Jiaming Zhou , Aobo Kong , Qicheng Li , Yong Qin

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) may be poisonous with backdoors or bias injected by the suspicious attacker during the fine-tuning process. A core challenge of purifying potentially poisonous PLMs is precisely finding poisonous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Zhiyuan Zhang , Deli Chen , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Xu Sun

Aligned LLMs are secure, capable of recognizing and refusing to answer malicious questions. However, the role of internal parameters in maintaining such security is not well understood yet, further these models can be vulnerable to security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Shen Li , Liuyi Yao , Lan Zhang , Yaliang Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) often assign disproportionate attention to the first token, a phenomenon known as the attention sink. Several recent approaches aim to address this issue, including Sink Attention in GPT-OSS and Gated Attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zizhuo Fu , Wenxuan Zeng , Runsheng Wang , Meng Li

Advances in language modeling have led to the development of deep attention-based models that are performant across a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) problems. These language models are typified by a pre-training process…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Joseph F DeRose , Jiayao Wang , Matthew Berger

Large language models exhibit remarkable performance across diverse tasks through pre-training and fine-tuning paradigms. However, continual fine-tuning on sequential tasks induces catastrophic forgetting, where newly acquired knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Olaf Yunus Laitinen Imanov

The safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains vulnerable to Harmful Fine-tuning (HFT). While existing defenses impose constraints on parameters, gradients, or internal representations, we observe that they can be effectively…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Guoxin Lu , Letian Sha , Qing Wang , Peijie Sun , Hao Zhou , Hua Dai , Fu Xiao

Recently, major AI providers such as Google and OpenAI have introduced Finetuning-as-a-Service (FaaS), which allows users to customize Large Language Models (LLMs) using their own data. However, this service is vulnerable to safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Seokil Ham , Yubin Choi , Yujin Yang , Seungju Cho , Younghun Kim , Changick Kim

Prompt learning is effective for fine-tuning foundation models to improve their generalization across a variety of downstream tasks. However, the prompts that are independently optimized along a single modality path, may sacrifice the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Yuncheng Yang , Chuyan Zhang , Zuopeng Yang , Yuting Gao , Yulei Qin , Ke Li , Xing Sun , Jie Yang , Yun Gu