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Related papers: Alignment Dynamics in LLM Fine-Tuning

200 papers

Going beyond mimicking limited human experiences, recent studies show initial evidence that, like humans, large language models (LLMs) are capable of improving their abilities purely by self-correction, i.e., correcting previous responses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yifei Wang , Yuyang Wu , Zeming Wei , Stefanie Jegelka , Yisen Wang

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) enables user-specific customization but introduces critical safety risks: even a few harmful examples can compromise safety alignment. A common mitigation strategy is to update the model more strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 ShengYun Peng , Pin-Yu Chen , Jianfeng Chi , Seongmin Lee , Duen Horng Chau

While the wide adoption of refusal training in large language models (LLMs) has showcased improvements in model safety, recent works have highlighted shortcomings due to the shallow nature of these alignment methods. To this end, the work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

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) alignment aims to ensure that the behavior of LLMs meets human preferences. While collecting data from multiple fine-grained, aspect-specific preferences becomes more and more feasible, existing alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jia Zhang , Yao Liu , Chen-Xi Zhang , Yi Liu , Yi-Xuan Jin , Lan-Zhe Guo , Yu-Feng Li

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assist ideation in research, but evaluating the quality of LLM-generated research proposals remains difficult: novelty and soundness are hard to measure automatically, and large-scale…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Heng Wang , Pengcheng Jiang , Jiashuo Sun , Zhiyi Shi , Haofei Yu , Jiawei Han , Heng Ji

Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning and instruction-following tasks, it is unclear whether they can reliably produce outputs aligned with a variety of user goals, a concept called steerability. Two gaps in current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Trenton Chang , Tobias Schnabel , Adith Swaminathan , Jenna Wiens

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned for reasoning tasks through a two-stage pipeline of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a process fraught with catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Lixuan He , Jie Feng , Yong Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

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

Large language models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their underlying reward functions and decision-making processes remain opaque. This paper introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jared Joselowitz , Ritam Majumdar , Arjun Jagota , Matthieu Bou , Nyal Patel , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in high-stakes scenarios, yet their safety mechanisms often remain fragile. Simple jailbreak prompts or even benign fine-tuning can bypass these protocols, underscoring the need to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Ching-Chia Kao , Chia-Mu Yu , Chun-Shien Lu , Chu-Song Chen

We identify a structural weakness in current large language model (LLM) alignment: modern refusal mechanisms are fail-open. While existing approaches encode refusal behaviors across multiple latent features, suppressing a single dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Zachary Coalson , Beth Sohler , Aiden Gabriel , Sanghyun Hong

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, but their safety and morality remain contentious due to their training on internet text corpora. To address these concerns, alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Mohammad Bahrami Karkevandi , Nishant Vishwamitra , Peyman Najafirad

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across industries has increased the demand for high-quality and customizable outputs. However, traditional alignment methods often require retraining large pretrained models, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Yi Liu , Dianqing Liu , Mingye Zhu , Junbo Guo , Yongdong Zhang , Zhendong Mao

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

In this work, we present Xwin-LM, a comprehensive suite of alignment methodologies for large language models (LLMs). This suite encompasses several key techniques, including supervised finetuning (SFT), reward modeling (RM), rejection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Bolin Ni , JingCheng Hu , Yixuan Wei , Houwen Peng , Zheng Zhang , Gaofeng Meng , Han Hu

While the real world is inherently stochastic, Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly evaluated on single-round inference against fixed ground truths. In this work, we shift the lens to distribution alignment: assessing whether…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Yanbei Jiang , Amr Keleg , Ryandito Diandaru , Jey Han Lau , Lea Frermann , Biaoyan Fang , Fajri Koto

Safety alignment is a key requirement for building reliable Artificial General Intelligence. Despite significant advances in safety alignment, we observe that minor latent shifts can still trigger unsafe responses in aligned models. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianle Gu , Kexin Huang , Zongqi Wang , Yixu Wang , Jie Li , Yuanqi Yao , Yang Yao , Yujiu Yang , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

Fine-tuning is the primary mechanism for adapting foundation models to downstream tasks; however, standard approaches largely optimize task objectives in isolation and do not account for secondary yet critical alignment objectives (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Gaurav Bhatt , Aditya Chinchure , Jiawei Zhou , Leonid Sigal