arXiv:2603. 07445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data.
By Guoli Wang, Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, An Wang
arXiv:2609.36862v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface...
By Muhammad Zeeshan Akram, Mufid Kamel Marican, Anvesh Reddy Yenugu, Ali Zain Kaimkhani, Minghong Fang
Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment.
arXiv:2608. 04347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning enables a source model to acquire desired capabilities and behaviors in a target domain while retaining much of its general-purpose competence.
By Kotaro Yoshida, Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez, Yukinori Yamamoto, Yuji Naraki, Ryotaro Shimizu, Wenya Wang
Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface: a small amount of harmful data mixed into an othe...
arXiv:2506. 08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures.
By Shuo Yang, Qihui Zhang, Yuyang Liu, Xiaojun Jia, Kunpeng Ning, Jiayu Yao, Jigang Wang, Hailiang Dai, Yibing Song, Li Yuan
CLEAR is a conditional safety adaptation framework that employs a lightweight hidden‑state gate to continuously control the activation strength of a safety low‑rank adapter. It aims to reduce harmful completions while preserving the performance of the frozen backbone on benign prompts. Experiments on safety and utility benchmarks, including HarmBench and GSM8K, show that CLEAR significantly lowers HarmBench ASR and improves utility compared to globally applied safety tuning methods such as SFT or standard LoRA.
By Chengxiao Wang, Enyi Jiang, Xiaojing Liao, Sanmi Koyejo
Fine-tuning enables a source model to acquire desired capabilities and behaviors in a target domain while retaining much of its general-purpose competence. However, this adaptation process can also degrade alignment properties that were present in the source model.
arXiv:2605.01913v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vul...
By Sadia Asif, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
arXiv:2606. 19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms.
By Jinhan Li, Kexian Tang, Yihan Xu, Zhuorui Ye, Kaifeng Lyu
arXiv:2607. 02914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse applications, yet ensuring their simultaneous safety, helpfulness, and trustworthiness remains a persistent challenge.
By Jiyang Guan, Yong Xie, Jun Chen, Jiexi Liu, Zipeng Ye, Defeng Li, Jiayu Shen, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue
PADM'E is a method for synthesizing preference‑aligned data to meta‑evaluate language‑model (LM) evaluators of agentic behaviors. It reframes meta‑evaluation as a preference judgment problem, generating criterion‑based data with small LMs and no human involvement. In a prototype, PADM'E produced 1,000 samples across four domains and three criteria, and human validation showed agreement with human judgment rising from 73% to 85% compared to a naive baseline.
By Cheng Chang, Yining Mao, Peng Qi