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The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly important with their democratization. In this paper, we study the safety degradation that comes with adapting LLMs to new tasks. We attribute this safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Lama Alssum , Hani Itani , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Philip Torr , Adel Bibi , Bernard Ghanem

The goal of continual learning is to improve the performance of recognition models in learning sequentially arrived data. Although most existing works are established on the premise of learning from scratch, growing efforts have been…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Gengwei Zhang , Liyuan Wang , Guoliang Kang , Ling Chen , Yunchao Wei

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential as general-purpose AI assistants across various domains. To fully leverage this potential in specific applications, many companies provide fine-tuning API services, enabling users to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Ning Lu , Shengcai Liu , Jiahao Wu , Weiyu Chen , Zhirui Zhang , Yew-Soon Ong , Qi Wang , Ke Tang

Alignment in large language models (LLMs) is used to enforce guidelines such as safety. Yet, alignment fails in the face of jailbreak attacks that modify inputs to induce unsafe outputs. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand , Yohan Beugin , Eric Pauley , Ryan Sheatsley , Patrick McDaniel

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language reasoning tasks, yet ensuring their safety remains a critical challenge. Recent input-side defenses detect unsafe images with CLIP and prepend safety…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xingyu Zhu , Beier Zhu , Junfeng Fang , Shuo Wang , Yin Zhang , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) with safety alignment can be jail-broken by fine-tuning on a dataset mixed with harmful data. First time in the literature, we show that the jail-broken effect can be mitigated by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Ling Liu

Organizations are increasingly adopting and adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) hosted on public repositories such as HuggingFace. Although these adaptations often improve performance on specialized downstream tasks, recent evidence…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Mina Taraghi , Yann Pequignot , Amin Nikanjam , Mohamed Amine Merzouk , Foutse Khomh

Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data. Prior work shows that introducing a small…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Guoli Wang , Haonan Shi , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of problematic training data after a model has been trained. The primary challenge in machine unlearning is ensuring that the process effectively removes specified data without compromising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Aviv Shamsian , Eitan Shaar , Aviv Navon , Gal Chechik , Ethan Fetaya

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have underscored their vulnerability to safety alignment jailbreaks, particularly when subjected to downstream fine-tuning. However, existing mitigation strategies primarily focus on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Lei Hsiung , Tianyu Pang , Yung-Chen Tang , Linyue Song , Tsung-Yi Ho , Pin-Yu Chen , Yaoqing Yang

Continual learning aims to sequentially learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks' knowledge (catastrophic forgetting). One factor that can cause forgetting is the interference between the gradients on losses from different tasks.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Xueying Bai , Jinghuan Shang , Yifan Sun , Niranjan Balasubramanian

Existing training-time safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely deployed alignment method, exhibits limitations in both experimental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Xuandong Zhao , Will Cai , Tianneng Shi , David Huang , Licong Lin , Song Mei , Dawn Song

Alignment methodologies have emerged as a critical pathway for enhancing language model alignment capabilities. While SFT (supervised fine-tuning) accelerates convergence through direct token-level loss intervention, its efficacy is…

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

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong alignment through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment is often fragile under subsequent fine-tuning. Existing explanations either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yuhan Huang , Huanran Chen , Yinpeng Dong

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

Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kathleen C. Fraser , Hillary Dawkins , Isar Nejadgholi , Svetlana Kiritchenko

The automatic classification of occupational accident reports is pivotal for workplace safety analysis but is persistently hindered by severe class imbalance and data scarcity. In this paper, we propose ABEX-RAT, a resource-efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Jian Chen , Jiabao Dou