Related papers: Mitigating the Safety-utility Trade-off in LLM Ali…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated considerable potential for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from Gradient Starvation and Policy Degradation when training directly on samples…
Continual Learning (CL) seeks to enable neural networks to incrementally acquire new knowledge (plasticity) while retaining existing knowledge (stability). Although pre-trained models (PTMs) have provided a strong foundation for CL,…
Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is expressive formal language that specifies spatio-temporal requirements in robotics. Its quantitative robustness semantics can be easily integrated with optimization-based control frameworks. However, STL…
Small language models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed on edge devices, making their safety alignment crucial yet challenging. Current shallow alignment methods that rely on direct refusal of malicious queries fail to provide robust…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…
Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves updating at least a few billions of parameters. A more parameter-efficient approach is Prompt Tuning (PT), which updates only a few learnable tokens, and differently, In-Context…
A key concern with the concept of "alignment" is the implicit question of "alignment to what?". AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally,…
Although safety stock optimisation has been studied for more than 60 years, most companies still use simplistic means to calculate necessary safety stock levels, partly due to the mismatch between existing analytical methods' emphases on…
In recent years, safety risks associated with large language models have become increasingly prominent, highlighting the urgent need to mitigate the generation of toxic and harmful content. The mainstream paradigm for LLM safety alignment…
Continual learning aims to learn multiple tasks sequentially. A key challenge in continual learning is balancing between two objectives: retaining knowledge from old tasks (stability) and adapting to new tasks (plasticity). Experience…
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…
Safe in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) adapts online from interaction history without test-time parameter updates while controlling episode cost under a safety budget. Under out-of-distribution (OOD) deployment shifts,…
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capabilities but suffer sophisticated jailbreak vulnerabilities. Fundamentally, aligning LVLMs is not just a safety challenge but a problem of economic efficiency. Current…
A core challenge in the development of increasingly capable AI systems is to make them safe and reliable by ensuring their behaviour is consistent with human values. This challenge, known as the alignment problem, does not merely apply to…
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is a subset of machine learning that introduces constraints into the traditional reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Unlike conventional RL which aims solely to maximize cumulative rewards, CRL…
Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…
A public safety Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) enhances situational awareness during emergency response. Its agility, mobility optimization, and ability to establish Line-of-Sight (LoS) communication make it increasingly important for…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…
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…