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Improving robustness of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to input degradations is critical for its deployment in high-stakes applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Our approach to this challenge prioritizes three key aspects:…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Sohyun Lee , Yeho Gwon , Lukas Hoyer , Suha Kwak

Fine-tuning safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) can substantially compromise their safety. Previous approaches require many safety samples or calibration sets, which not only incur significant computational overhead during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jiawen Zhang , Lipeng He , Kejia Chen , Jian Lou , Jian Liu , Xiaohu Yang , Ruoxi Jia

Guardrail Classifiers defend production language models against harmful behavior, but although results seem promising in testing, they provide no formal guarantees. Providing formal guarantees for such models is hard because "harmful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Nikita Kezins , Urbas Ekka , Pascal Berrang , Luca Arnaboldi

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

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is extremely fragile, as fine-tuning on a small number of benign samples can erase safety behaviors learned from millions of preference examples. Existing studies attempt to explain this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiao Wang , Yifei Zhang , YongKang Liu , Xiaocui Yang , Zihan Wang , Shi Feng , Daling Wang

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

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked widespread concerns about their safety. Recent work demonstrates that safety alignment of LLMs can be easily removed by fine-tuning with a few adversarially chosen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Samuele Poppi , Zheng-Xin Yong , Yifei He , Bobbie Chern , Han Zhao , Aobo Yang , Jianfeng Chi

Large Language Models (LLMs) deploy safety mechanisms to prevent harmful outputs, yet these defenses remain vulnerable to adversarial prompts. While existing research demonstrates that jailbreak attacks succeed, it does not explain…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Hayfa Dhabhi , Kashyap Thimmaraju

Large Language Model (LLM) safety guardrail models have emerged as a primary defense mechanism against harmful content generation, yet their robustness against sophisticated adversarial attacks remains poorly characterized. This study…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Richard J. Young

Guard models are a critical component of LLM safety, but their sensitivity to superficial linguistic variations remains a key vulnerability. We show that even meaning-preserving paraphrases can cause large fluctuations in safety scores,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Cristina Pinneri , Christos Louizos

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

Lane detection stands as a crucial perception task in autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems. However, existing methods still degrade in complex real scenarios due to two major limitations. First, classification…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tiancheng Wang , Zhaolu Ding , Richeng Xu , Tianhui Zheng , Hui Liu , Hanyu Xuan , Zhiliang Wu , Guanghui Yue

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong but shallow alignment: they directly refuse harmful queries when a refusal is expected at the very start of an assistant turn, yet this protection collapses once a harmful continuation is underway…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jiawei Zhang , Andrew Estornell , David D. Baek , Bo Li , Xiaojun Xu

Black-box finetuning is an emerging interface for adapting state-of-the-art language models to user needs. However, such access may also let malicious actors undermine model safety. To demonstrate the challenge of defending finetuning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Danny Halawi , Alexander Wei , Eric Wallace , Tony T. Wang , Nika Haghtalab , Jacob Steinhardt

This paper is motivated by recent research in the $d$-dimensional stochastic linear bandit literature, which has revealed an unsettling discrepancy: algorithms like Thompson sampling and Greedy demonstrate promising empirical performance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yuwei Luo , Mohsen Bayati

Adversarial robustness has become a topic of growing interest in machine learning since it was observed that neural networks tend to be brittle. We propose an information-geometric formulation of adversarial defense and introduce FIRE, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Marine Picot , Francisco Messina , Malik Boudiaf , Fabrice Labeau , Ismail Ben Ayed , Pablo Piantanida

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous, tool-calling agents has fundamentally altered the cybersecurity landscape. Frameworks like OpenClaw grant AI systems operating-system-level permissions and the autonomy to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Zonghao Ying , Xiao Yang , Siyang Wu , Yumeng Song , Yang Qu , Hainan Li , Tianlin Li , Jiakai Wang , Aishan Liu , Xianglong Liu

Large language models exhibit systematic vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks despite extensive safety alignment. We provide a mechanistic analysis revealing that position-dependent gradient weakening during autoregressive training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Thong Bach , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

Safety-aligned language models must refuse harmful requests without broad over-refusal, but it remains unclear how dynamic adversarial fine-tuning changes refusal-control carriers: Kullback--Leibler (KL)-constrained directions or small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Wenhao Lan , Shan Li , Xinhua Lai , Meiqi Wu , Junbin Yang , Haihua Shen , Yijun Yang