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Safety alignment is an important procedure before the official deployment of a Large Language Model (LLM). While safety alignment has been extensively studied for LLM, there is still a large research gap for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Zachary Yahn , Yichang Xu , Ling Liu

Large language models (LLMs) show inherent brittleness in their safety mechanisms, as evidenced by their susceptibility to jailbreaking and even non-malicious fine-tuning. This study explores this brittleness of safety alignment by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Boyi Wei , Kaixuan Huang , Yangsibo Huang , Tinghao Xie , Xiangyu Qi , Mengzhou Xia , Prateek Mittal , Mengdi Wang , Peter Henderson

The reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved by training them with reinforcement learning (RL). The RL objective for LLM training involves a regularization term, which is the reverse…

Reinforcement learning has shown remarkable performance in aligning language models with human preferences, leading to the rise of attention towards developing RLHF platforms. These platforms enable users to fine-tune models without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Erfan Entezami , Ali Naseh

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

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard method to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. In this work, we introduce alignment tampering, a potential vulnerability where the LLM undergoing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Dongyoon Hahm , Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Kimin Lee

Misaligned research objectives have considerably hindered progress in adversarial robustness research over the past decade. For instance, an extensive focus on optimizing target metrics, while neglecting rigorous standardized evaluation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Leo Schwinn , Yan Scholten , Tom Wollschläger , Sophie Xhonneux , Stephen Casper , Stephan Günnemann , Gauthier Gidel

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck. To address this critical yet challenging issue, we present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Shipeng Li , Zhiqin Yang , Shikun Li , Xiaobo Xia , Hengyu Liu , Xinghua Zhang , Gaode Chen , Dong Fang , Ying Tai , Zhe Peng

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

Safety alignment is crucial to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave in ways that align with human preferences and prevent harmful actions during inference. However, recent studies show that the alignment can be easily compromised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 ShengYun Peng , Pin-Yu Chen , Matthew Hull , Duen Horng Chau

As the post-training of large language models (LLMs) advances from instruction-following to complex reasoning tasks, understanding how different data affect finetuning dynamics remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ming Li , Yanhong Li , Ziyue Li , Tianyi Zhou

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose critical safety challenges, as they are susceptible not only to adversarial attacks such as jailbreaking but also to inadvertently generating harmful content for benign users. While internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ming Wen , Kun Yang , Xin Chen , Jingyu Zhang , Dingding Han , Shiwen Cui , Yuedong Xu

Reasoning-capable LLMs have achieved major breakthroughs in solving complex problems, but recent work shows that acquiring and deploying strong reasoning can introduce significant safety risks. A common mitigation is to apply a secondary…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yihao Xue , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Aakanksha , Arash Ahmadian , Beyza Ermis , Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant , Julia Kreutzer , Marzieh Fadaee , Sara Hooker

Despite the empirical success of meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL), there are still a number poorly-understood discrepancies between theory and practice. Critically, biased gradient estimates are almost always implemented in practice,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Yunhao Tang

The safety alignment ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is prone to be degraded by the integration of the vision module compared to its LLM backbone. We investigate this phenomenon, dubbed as ''safety alignment degradation'' in this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Qin Liu , Chao Shang , Ling Liu , Nikolaos Pappas , Jie Ma , Neha Anna John , Srikanth Doss , Lluis Marquez , Miguel Ballesteros , Yassine Benajiba

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Johannes Ackermann , Michael Noukhovitch , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on code with security vulnerabilities can result in misaligned and unsafe behaviors across broad domains. These results prompted concerns about the emergence of harmful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jeremiah Giordani

Specification gaming under Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to cause LLMs to develop sycophantic, manipulative, or deceptive behavior, yet the conditions under which this occurs remain unclear. We train 11 instruction-tuned LLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Leon Eshuijs , Shihan Wang , Antske Fokkens