Related papers: Alignment Dynamics in LLM Fine-Tuning

Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary capabilities in understanding complex contexts and performing a wide range of tasks. However, LLMs can also answer questions that are unethical or harmful, raising concerns about…

Safety alignment for large language models (LLMs) aims to reduce harmful or unsafe behavior while preserving general utility. However, recent findings reveal that alignment effects can be fragile: lightweight post-alignment manipulations,…

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for addressing a wide range of general inquiries and tasks. Despite this, fine-tuning aligned LLMs on smaller, domain-specific datasets, critical to adapting them to specialized…

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…

Recent advances in reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are largely driven by reinforcement learning (RL), yet the underlying parameter dynamics during RL training remain poorly understood. This work identifies two…

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), alignment has emerged as a fundamental yet challenging problem in the pursuit of more reliable, controllable, and capable machine intelligence. The recent success of reasoning models and…

Post-training alignment is central to deploying large language models (LLMs), yet practical workflows remain split across backend-specific tools and ad-hoc glue code, making experiments hard to reproduce. We identify backend interference,…

The alignment process changes several properties of a large language model's (LLM's) output distribution. We analyze two aspects of post-alignment distributional shift of LLM responses. First, we re-examine previously reported reductions in…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) based on human preferences, commonly achieved through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has been effective in improving their performance. However, maintaining LLM safety throughout…

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…

Training large language models (LLMs) typically involves pre-training on massive corpora, only to restart the process entirely when new data becomes available. A more efficient and resource-conserving approach would be continual…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for large language models (LLMs), but its performance is highly sensitive to the quality of training problems. This sensitivity stems from the non-stationarity of RL:…

The prevailing approach to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on human or AI feedback and assumes access to specific types of preference datasets. In our work, we question the efficacy of such datasets and explore…

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…

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…

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as these models become increasingly integrated into various societal and decision-making processes. Traditional methods, such as reinforcement learning from human…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rarely static and are frequently updated in practice. A growing body of alignment research has shown that models initially deemed "aligned" can exhibit misaligned behavior after fine-tuning, such as…

The current safeguard mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are indeed susceptible to jailbreak attacks, making them inherently fragile. Even the process of fine-tuning on apparently benign data for downstream tasks can jeopardize…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…