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Related papers: Mitigating the Safety-utility Trade-off in LLM Ali…

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Ensuring safe and appropriate responses from vision-language models (VLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in high-risk or ambiguous scenarios. We introduce SafeCoT, a lightweight, interpretable framework that leverages…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Jiachen Ma , Zhanhui Zhou , Chao Yang , Chaochao Lu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) based on human preferences, commonly achieved through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has been effective in improving their performance. However, maintaining LLM safety throughout…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yingshui Tan , Yilei Jiang , Yanshi Li , Jiaheng Liu , Xingyuan Bu , Wenbo Su , Xiangyu Yue , Xiaoyong Zhu , Bo Zheng

Balancing helpfulness and safety (harmlessness) is a critical challenge in aligning large language models (LLMs). Current approaches often decouple these two objectives, training separate preference models for helpfulness and safety, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Xiyue Peng , Hengquan Guo , Jiawei Zhang , Dongqing Zou , Ziyu Shao , Honghao Wei , Xin Liu

Aligning large language models with human preferences must balance two competing goals: responding helpfully to legitimate requests and reliably refusing harmful ones. Most preference-based safety alignment methods collapse safety into a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Tiankai Yang , Yi Nian , Xinyuan Li , Ruiyao Xu , Kaize Ding , Yue Zhao

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable advances in role-playing dialogue agents, demonstrating their utility in character simulations. However, it remains challenging for these agents to balance character portrayal utility with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Yihong Tang , Kehai Chen , Xuefeng Bai , Zhengyu Niu , Bo Wang , Jie Liu , Min Zhang

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting empowers Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring reasoning reliability remains an open challenge. Contrary to the prevailing cascading failure hypothesis which posits that early errors are most…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Dongxu Zhang , Yujun Wu , Yiding Sun , Jinnan Yang , Ning Yang , Jihua Zhu , Miao Xin , Baoliang Tian

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in NLP and deep learning. In-Context Learning (ICL) has been suggested as a bridging paradigm between the training-free and fine-tuning LLMs settings. In ICL, an LLM is conditioned to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Jérémie Cabessa , Hugo Hernault , Umer Mushtaq

In-context learning (ICL) allows LLMs to learn from examples without changing their weights: this is a particularly promising capability for long-context LLMs that can potentially learn from many examples. Recently, Lin et al. (2024)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Hao Zhao , Maksym Andriushchenko , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

Ensuring the safety of language models (LMs) while maintaining their usefulness remains a critical challenge in AI alignment. Current approaches rely on sequential adversarial training: generating adversarial prompts and fine-tuning LMs to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Anselm Paulus , Ilia Kulikov , Brandon Amos , Rémi Munos , Ivan Evtimov , Kamalika Chaudhuri , Arman Zharmagambetov

While the wide adoption of refusal training in large language models (LLMs) has showcased improvements in model safety, recent works have highlighted shortcomings due to the shallow nature of these alignment methods. To this end, the work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

Safety post-training can improve the harmfulness and policy compliance of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it may also reduce general utility, a phenomenon often described as the \emph{alignment tax}. We study this trade-off through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guanglong Sun , Siyuan Zhang , Liyuan Wang , Jun Zhu , Hang Su , Yi Zhong

Ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as they become integral to applications like translation and question answering. Current alignment methods struggle with dynamic user intentions and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Rima Hazra , Sayan Layek , Somnath Banerjee , Soujanya Poria

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on some task-specific datasets has been a primary use of LLMs. However, it has been empirically observed that this approach to enhancing capability inevitably compromises safety, a phenomenon also…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-28 Pin-Yu Chen , Han Shen , Payel Das , Tianyi Chen

This paper investigates the expected excess risk of in-context learning (ICL) for multiclass classification. We formalize each task as a sequence of labeled examples followed by a query input; a pretrained model then estimates the query's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-03 Chenrui Liu , Falong Tan , Chuanlong Xie , Yicheng Zeng , Lixing Zhu

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet their ability to make context-aware safety decisions remains limited. Existing methods often fail to balance oversensitivity (unjustified…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Zheyuan Liu , Zhangchen Xu , Guangyao Dou , Xiangchi Yuan , Zhaoxuan Tan , Radha Poovendran , Meng Jiang

The safety of large language models (LLMs) has increasingly emerged as a fundamental aspect of their development. Existing safety alignment for LLMs is predominantly achieved through post-training methods, which are computationally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sicheng Shen , Mingyang Lv , Han Shen , Jialin Wu , Binghao Wang , Zhou Yang , Guobin Shen , Dongcheng Zhao , Feifei Zhao , Yi Zeng

Recent advancements in model architectures and length extrapolation techniques have significantly extended the context length of large language models (LLMs), paving the way for their application in increasingly complex tasks. However,…

In-context learning (ICL) of large language models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention in the community where LLMs make predictions only based on instructions augmented with a few examples. Existing example selection methods for ICL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Haowei Du , Dongyan Zhao