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Related papers: When Safety Geometry Collapses: Fine-Tuning Vulner…

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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

Fine-tuning aligned language models on benign tasks unpredictably degrades safety guardrails, even when training data contains no harmful content and developers have no adversarial intent. We show that the prevailing explanation, that…

Fine-tuning approaches for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) face a critical three-way trade-off between In-Distribution (ID) accuracy, Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, and adversarial robustness. Existing robust fine-tuning strategies…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Shivang Chopra , Shaunak Halbe , Chengyue Huang , Brisa Maneechotesuwan , Zsolt Kira

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in diverse tasks, yet their safety alignment remains fragile during adaptation. Even when fine-tuning on benign data or with low-rank adaptation, pre-trained safety behaviors are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Bingjie Zhang , Yibo Yang , Zhe Ren , Dandan Guo , Jindong Gu , Philip Torr , Bernard Ghanem

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

The safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains vulnerable to Harmful Fine-tuning (HFT). While existing defenses impose constraints on parameters, gradients, or internal representations, we observe that they can be effectively…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Guoxin Lu , Letian Sha , Qing Wang , Peijie Sun , Hao Zhou , Hua Dai , Fu Xiao

Adversarial threats against LLMs are escalating faster than current defenses can adapt. We expose a critical geometric blind spot in alignment: adversarial prompts exploit latent camouflage, embedding perilously close to the safe…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Danush Khanna , Gurucharan Marthi Krishna Kumar , Basab Ghosh , Yaswanth Narsupalli , Vinija Jain , Vasu Sharma , Aman Chadha , Amitava Das

Fine-tuning-as-a-Service introduces a critical vulnerability where a few malicious examples mixed into the user's fine-tuning dataset can compromise the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While a recognized paradigm frames…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Biao Yi , Jiahao Li , Baolei Zhang , Lihai Nie , Tong Li , Tiansheng Huang , Zheli Liu

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

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 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

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

Safety alignment in large language models is remarkably shallow: it is concentrated in the first few output tokens and reversible by fine-tuning on as few as 100 adversarial examples. This fragility becomes critical in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

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

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

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks often compromises safety alignment, even when using parameter-efficient methods like LoRA. In this work, we uncover a notable property: fine-tuned models preserve the geometric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Thong Bach , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

While large language models (LLMs) such as Llama-2 or GPT-4 have shown impressive zero-shot performance, fine-tuning is still necessary to enhance their performance for customized datasets, domain-specific tasks, or other private needs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Chia-Yi Hsu , Yu-Lin Tsai , Chih-Hsun Lin , Pin-Yu Chen , Chia-Mu Yu , Chun-Ying Huang

Adaptation of blackbox generative models has been widely studied recently through the exploration of several methods including generator fine-tuning, latent space searches, leveraging singular value decomposition, and so on. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sinjini Mitra , Constantine Kyriakakis , Shenyuan Liang , Anuj Srivastava , Pavan Turaga

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

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
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