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Related papers: Safety Alignment as Continual Learning: Mitigating…

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Parameter-efficient tunings (PETs) have demonstrated impressive performance and promising perspectives in training large models, while they are still confronted with a common problem: the trade-off between learning new content and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Jingyang Qiao , Zhizhong Zhang , Xin Tan , Yanyun Qu , Wensheng Zhang , Zhi Han , Yuan Xie

Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently presents a multi-objective optimization conflict, often accompanied by an unintended degradation of general capabilities. Existing mitigation strategies typically rely on global…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Wang Cai , Yilin Wen , Jinchang Hou , Du Su , Guoqiu Wang , Zhonghou Lv , Chenfu Bao , Yunfang Wu

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) has been gaining increasing attention. However, current safety-aligned LLMs suffer from the fragile and imbalanced safety mechanisms, which can still be induced to generate unsafe responses,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Weixiang Zhao , Yulin Hu , Zhuojun Li , Yang Deng , Jiahe Guo , Xingyu Sui , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

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

Training large language models (LLMs) typically involves pre-training on massive corpora, only to restart the process entirely when new data becomes available. A more efficient and resource-conserving approach would be continual…

While reasoning models have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, their increasing power necessitates stringent safety measures. For safety alignment, the core challenge lies in the inherent trade-off between safety and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yanbo Wang , Minzheng Wang , Jian Liang , Lu Wang , Yongcan Yu , Ran He

Safety alignment for large language models (LLMs) aims to reduce harmful or unsafe behavior while preserving general utility. However, recent findings reveal that alignment effects can be fragile: lightweight post-alignment manipulations,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhihao Liu , Yifan Wu , Jian Lou , Di Wang , Yuxi Zhou , Yuke Hu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specialized domains often necessitates a trade-off between acquiring domain expertise and retaining general reasoning capabilities, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Xiyang Zhang , Yuanhe Tian , Hongzhi Wang , Yan Song

Recent advances in alignment techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved the safety of large language models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Mengxuan Hu , Vivek V. Datla , Anoop Kumar , Zihan Guan , Sheng Li , Alfy Samuel , Daben Liu

Although recent years have witnessed significant advancements in medical image segmentation, the pervasive issue of domain shift among medical images from diverse centres hinders the effective deployment of pre-trained models. Many…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Ziyang Chen , Yiwen Ye , Yongsheng Pan , Yong Xia

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become a standard tool for efficiently fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Yet, even minor LoRA updates can induce alignment drift, weakening safety and behavioral constraints through entangled parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Amitava Das , Abhilekh Borah , Vinija Jain , Aman Chadha

Large Language Models (LLMs) pose a significant risk of safety misalignment after finetuning, as models can be compromised by both explicitly and implicitly harmful data. Even some seemingly benign data can inadvertently steer a model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zhanhao Hu , Xiao Huang , Patrick Mendoza , Emad A. Alghamdi , Basel Alomair , Raluca Ada Popa , David Wagner

Deep neural network training involves both forward propagation (from features through logits to loss) and backward propagation (from loss through gradients to parameter updates). While perturbations along the forward chain, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hua Li

The deployment of autonomous robots in safety-critical applications requires safety guarantees. Provably safe reinforcement learning is an active field of research that aims to provide such guarantees using safeguards. These safeguards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Tim Walter , Hannah Markgraf , Jonathan Külz , Matthias Althoff

In neural networks, continual learning results in gradient interference among sequential tasks, leading to catastrophic forgetting of old tasks while learning new ones. This issue is addressed in recent methods by storing the important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Gobinda Saha , Kaushik Roy

Safety alignment incurs safety tax that perturbs a large reasoning model's (LRM) general reasoning ability. Existing datasets used for safety alignment for an LRM are usually constructed by distilling safety reasoning traces and answers…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yingsha Xie , Tiansheng Huang , Enneng Yang , Rui Min , Wenjie Lu , Xiaochun Cao , Naiqiang Tan , Li Shen

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities, they unintentionally memorize sensitive data, posing critical privacy and security risks. Machine unlearning is pivotal for mitigating these risks, yet existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Pengyu Li , Lingling Zhang , Zhitao Gao , Yanrui Wu , Yuxuan Dong , Huan Liu , Bifan Wei , Jun Liu

Asynchronous execution is essential for scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to modern large model workloads, including large language models and AI agents, but it can fundamentally alter RL optimization behavior. While prior work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Haofeng Xu , Junwei Su , Yukun Tian , Lansong Diao , Zhengping Qian , Chuan Wu

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adoption across a wide range of tasks, ranging from code generation to machine translation and sentiment analysis, etc. Red teaming/Safety alignment efforts show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Essa Jan , Nouar AlDahoul , Moiz Ali , Faizan Ahmad , Fareed Zaffar , Yasir Zaki

The deployment of large language models (LLMs) raises significant ethical and safety concerns. While LLM alignment techniques are adopted to improve model safety and trustworthiness, adversaries can exploit these techniques to undermine…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Rui Zhang , Hongwei Li , Yun Shen , Xinyue Shen , Wenbo Jiang , Guowen Xu , Yang Liu , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang