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Harmful fine-tuning attacks pose a major threat to the security of large language models (LLMs), allowing adversaries to compromise safety guardrails with minimal harmful data. While existing defenses attempt to reinforce LLM alignment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yuhui Wang , Rongyi Zhu , Ting Wang

Continual learning in large language models (LLMs) is prone to catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks significantly degrades performance on previously learned ones. Existing methods typically rely on low-rank,…

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

Large Language Models exhibit mode collapse, producing homogeneous outputs that fail to explore valid solution spaces. We present QD-LLM, a framework for parameter-efficient neuroevolution that evolves prompt embeddings, compact neural…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

Vision-Language adaptation (VL adaptation) transforms Large Language Models (LLMs) into Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for multimodal tasks, but this process often compromises the inherent safety capabilities embedded in the original…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Seongyun Lee , Geewook Kim , Jiyeon Kim , Hyunji Lee , Hoyeon Chang , Sue Hyun Park , Minjoon Seo

Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pre-training, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, the impact of SFT on a model's knowledge remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Junjie Ye , Yuming Yang , Yang Nan , Shuo Li , Qi Zhang , Tao Gui , Xuanjing Huang , Peng Wang , Zhongchao Shi , Jianping Fan

Fine-tuning language models is commonly believed to inevitably harm their safety, i.e., refusing to respond to harmful user requests, even when using harmless datasets, thus requiring additional safety measures. We challenge this belief…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Minseon Kim , Jin Myung Kwak , Lama Alssum , Bernard Ghanem , Philip Torr , David Krueger , Fazl Barez , Adel Bibi

Small Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly being deployed in resource-constrained environments, yet their behavioral robustness to data contamination during instruction tuning remains poorly understood. We systematically investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Nicy Scaria , Silvester John Joseph Kennedy , Deepak Subramani

Fine-tuning LLMs on benign data can still degrade alignment and adversarial robustness, yet direct analysis of the role of fine-tuning objectives in shaping these safety outcomes remain limited. We present a controlled comparison of six…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Daniel Vennemeyer , Punya Syon Pandey , Phan Anh Duong , Michael Umeokoli , Samuel Ratnam

The integration of speech into Large Language Models (LLMs) has substantially expanded their capabilities, but often at the cost of weakening their core textual competence. This degradation limits the ability of speech-enabled LLMs to fully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Chao Wang , Rui-Chen Zheng , Yang Ai , Zhen-Hua Ling

Large Language Models (LLMs) generating unsafe responses to toxic prompts is a significant issue in their applications. While various efforts aim to address this safety concern, previous approaches often demand substantial human data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Yuxiao Lu , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham

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

As advancements in large language models (LLMs) continue and the demand for personalized models increases, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods (e.g., LoRA) will become essential due to their efficiency in reducing computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-06 Mingjie Li , Wai Man Si , Michael Backes , Yang Zhang , Yisen Wang

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

We propose a constraint learning schema for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with attribute control. Given a training corpus and control criteria formulated as a sequence-level constraint on model outputs, our method fine-tunes the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Tao Meng , Ninareh Mehrabi , Palash Goyal , Anil Ramakrishna , Aram Galstyan , Richard Zemel , Kai-Wei Chang , Rahul Gupta , Charith Peris

Fine-tuning LLMs on narrowly harmful datasets can lead to behavior that is broadly misaligned with respect to human values. To understand when and how this emergent misalignment occurs, we develop a comprehensive framework for detecting and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Julian Arnold , Niels Lörch

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

Context: In the fast-paced evolution of software development, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable tools for tasks such as code generation, completion, analysis, and bug fixing. Ensuring the robustness of these models…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yang Liu , Armstrong Foundjem , Xingfang Wu , Heng Li , Foutse Khomh

The safety mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) exhibit notable fragility, as even fine-tuning on datasets without harmful content may still undermine their safety capabilities. Meanwhile, existing safety alignment methods…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Guanghao Zhou , Panjia Qiu , Cen Chen , Hongyu Li , Mingyuan Chu , Xin Zhang , Jun Zhou

LLMs(Large Language Models) nowadays have widespread adoption as a tool for solving issues across various domain/tasks. These models since are susceptible to produce harmful or toxic results, inference-time adversarial attacks, therefore…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Sachin Kumar