Related papers: Alignment Dynamics in LLM Fine-Tuning

Generalizable alignment is a core challenge for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) safely in real-world NLP applications. Current alignment methods, including Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often fail to guarantee…

Emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on narrow, non-harmful tasks induces harmful behaviors, poses a key challenge for AI safety in LLMs. Despite growing empirical evidence, its underlying mechanism remains unclear. To uncover the…

By pretraining on trillions of tokens, an LLM gains the capability of text generation. However, to enhance its utility and reduce potential harm, SFT and alignment are applied sequentially to the pretrained model. Because SFT and alignment…

The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…

Alignment training is crucial for enabling large language models (LLMs) to cater to human intentions and preferences. It is typically performed based on two stages with different objectives: instruction-following alignment and…

Why is safety alignment in LLMs shallow? We prove that gradient-based alignment inherently concentrates on positions where harm is decided and vanishes beyond. Using a martingale decomposition of sequence-level harm, we derive an exact…

While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RFT) are standard for LLM alignment, they either rely on costly expert data or discard valuable negative samples, leading to data inefficiency. To address this, we…

Post-training alignment has increasingly become a crucial factor in enhancing the usability of language models (LMs). However, the strength of alignment varies depending on individual preferences. This paper proposes a method to incorporate…

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…

Self-improvement through post-training methods such as iterative preference learning has been acclaimed for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning) of Large Language Models (LLMs) without human…

Finetuning large language models on narrowly harmful datasets can cause them to become emergently misaligned, giving stereotypically `evil' responses across diverse unrelated settings. Concerningly, a pre-registered survey of experts failed…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained for downstream tasks by updating their parameters (e.g., via RL). However, updating parameters forces them to absorb task-specific information, which can result in catastrophic forgetting and loss of…

Although large language models (LLMs) achieve effective safety alignment at the time of release, they still face various safety challenges. A key issue is that fine-tuning often compromises the safety alignment of LLMs. To address this…

Language models trained on large-scale corpus often generate content that is harmful, toxic, or contrary to human preferences, making their alignment with human values a critical concern. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF)…

Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have led to their widespread usage for various tasks. The prevalence of LLMs in society implores the assurance on the reliability of their performance. In particular, risk-sensitive…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across many applications, but their ability to generate harmful content raises serious safety concerns. Although safety alignment techniques are often applied during pre-training…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is achieved through fine-tuning mechanisms that regulate neuron activations to suppress harmful content. In this work, we propose a novel approach to induce disalignment by identifying and…

Direct evaluation of LLMs on benchmarks can be misleading because comparatively strong performance may reflect task familiarity rather than capability. The train-before-test approach controls for task familiarity by giving each model…

In information retrieval, training reranking models mainly focuses on two types of objectives: metric learning (e.g. contrastive loss to increase the predicted scores on relevant query-document pairs) and classification (binary label…

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…