The paper introduces RASET, a router‑agnostic safety‑critical expert tuning framework for Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) large language models. RASET identifies a small subset of experts that are responsible for safety enforcement and applies parameter‑efficient tuning only to those experts, preserving the model’s intrinsic routing behavior. Experiments on five open‑weight MoE backbones show that RASET achieves a high safety‑bypass yield, outperforming existing baselines by a significant margin.
By Zhibo Zhang, Yuxi Li, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang
arXiv:2606. 00651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently, enabling greater capacity with reduced computational cost by dynamically routing inputs to relevant experts, yet introduce a critical vulnerability: Safety Sparsity, where safety capabilities concentrate in few experts, making them susceptible to adversarial bypassing.
By Yitong Sun, Yao Huang, Teng Li, Ranjie Duan, Yichi Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Hui Xue, Xingxing Wei
The paper introduces SEAL, a training-time, parameter‑efficient defense that attaches a plug‑and‑play adapter to the shared expert component of Mixture‑of‑Experts models, and SEAL++, which adds an orthogonal constraint to preserve existing safety subspaces. By leveraging the always‑activated shared expert, SEAL mitigates the structural vulnerability of sparse routing to adversarial manipulation, reducing attack success rates by up to 60% with minimal impact on model capability. The approach is evaluated across six attack scenarios involving harmful prompting, jailbreaks, malicious fine‑tuning, and neuron pruning.
By Qingyu Meng, Yiwei Zha, Jiahuan Pei, Koen Hindriks, Herbert Bos, Min Chen
arXiv:2608. 02674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the widespread deployment of large foundation models (LFMs) in open environments, safety threats are shifting from black-box jailbreaks toward white-box attacks that directly identify and disrupt internal safety neurons or routes.
By Shangze Li, Chuancheng Shi, Simiao Xie, Lingzhi He, Cheng Ji, Zifeng Cheng, Fei Shen, Chao Wu, Tat-Seng Chua
The paper introduces GRIP, an algorithm‑agnostic framework for machine unlearning in Mixture‑of‑Experts large language models. GRIP enforces hard geometric constraints on router updates, projecting gradient changes into the null space of the retain set’s routing matrix to prevent routing manipulation. Two variants—training‑time stochastic projection and post‑training analytical correction—show significant improvements in routing stability, retain accuracy, and resistance to white‑box adversarial recovery across two MoE models.
By Andy Zhu, Rongzhe Wei, Yupu Gu, Pan Li
arXiv:2607. 27081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning is the dominant paradigm for specializing large language models (LLMs), yet it exposes a critical vulnerability: malicious data providers can embed harmful behaviors into downstream corpora, creating models that retain professional skills while violating human values on demand.
By Yongjian Guo, Wanlun Ma, Lingyu Shen, Xi Xiao, Sheng Wen
arXiv:2608. 12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to harmful requests and jailbreak attacks.
By Fangzhou Chen, Shiji Zhao, Mengyang Wang, Qihui Zhu, Ranjie Duan, Maoxun Yuan, Xingxing Wei
arXiv:2606. 00686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prevailing paradigm in large language model (LLM) alignment operates via erasure, filtering unsafe data or training models to strictly refuse harmful prompts.
By Maryam Hashemzadeh, Jerry Huang, Minseon Kim, Marc-Alexandre C\^ot\'e, Sarath Chandar
arXiv:2602. 16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Sasha Behrouzi, Lichao Wu, Mohamadreza Rostami, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
The paper introduces a modular correction framework for large language models that uses Activated LoRA adapters and a context-aware routing mechanism to mitigate harmful outputs. By allowing expert adapters to activate mid-sequence without invalidating the KV cache, the system achieves low-latency, targeted correction during generation. Experiments show improved alignment on safety benchmarks while maintaining task performance, presenting a lightweight, scalable approach to safer LLM deployments.
By Roberto Campbell, Momin Abbass, Muneeza Azmat, Michal Ulewicz, Raya Horesh, Kristjan Greenewald, Rog\'erio Abreu de Paula, Nathalie Baracaldo
The paper investigates safety risks in model merging, showing that even when all constituent models are individually safety‑aligned, merging can expose a jailbreak vulnerability rooted in the pretrained foundation model. It introduces Basin‑Aware Jailbreak (BAJ), a min–max optimization method that generates adversarial suffixes transferable across merged models sharing the same backbone, without needing the exact merging coefficients or checkpoints. Experiments demonstrate BAJ’s high transfer success rates across diverse backbones and merging settings, and its resilience against existing defenses.
By Yu Zhe, Yixin Tan, Junhao Wei, Wang Chen
arXiv:2606. 15788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) constitute pivotal components within the AI-dominated information technology ecosystem.
By Aman Anifer, Vignesh Kumar Kembu, Vishnu M, Antonino Nocera, Vinod P., Amal Murali PK, Akshay S Rajan