The paper investigates whether existing AI safety benchmarks, designed for large language models, are suitable for evaluating small language models (SLMs). By testing five benchmark suites on 26 open‑source SLMs with a unified scoring rubric, the authors find that ambiguous judgments dominate, especially for complex prompts and certain architectures. This ambiguity, linked to factors like lexical density and output perplexity, undermines the reliability of aggregate leaderboards and reveals a confound between model capability and perceived safety.
By Nyamtulla Shaik, Fengjun Li, Bo Luo
The paper introduces a chance-constrained approach to fine‑tune large language models (LLMs) that limits the proportion of safety examples whose performance degrades beyond a set threshold relative to a reference model. By replacing the discontinuous violation indicator with a differentiable majorization, the authors derive a tractable, conservative constraint and a closed‑form, constraint‑aware gradient update that focuses on examples near or above the degradation threshold. Experiments on harmful fine‑tuning across three tasks and models show that this tail‑aware method consistently outperforms existing safety‑preserving baselines, suggesting that safety preservation should be treated as a reliability‑constrained optimization problem rather than average‑risk regularization.
By Taha Entesari, Mahyar Fazlyab
arXiv:2608. 11705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligned large language models (LLMs) are expected to exhibit safety behavior based on the content of the user request: they should refuse unsafe requests and comply with safe ones.
By Lang Cao
arXiv:2606. 28843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a large language model is a ubiquitous method for enhancing its capability on a specific downstream task.
By Will Hawkins, Kaivalya Rawal, Jonathan Rystr{\o}m, Stratis Tsirtsis, Zihao Fu, Greta Warren, Ryan Brown, Eoin Delaney, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, Chris Russell
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
arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.
By Jiayi Li, Kun Zhan
SafeTune is a source‑available library that consolidates four safety‑intervention paradigms—post‑hoc weight recovery, safety‑constrained fine‑tuning, gradient‑based unlearning, and inference‑time steering—into a single, configuration‑driven workflow. It offers shared interpretability, evaluation, and deployment tools, and its modular registry allows easy addition of new methods, benchmarks, judges, models, and fine‑tuning domains. The authors demonstrate SafeTune with controlled comparisons and case studies in finance and medical deployments, showing how it characterizes safety drift, evaluates interventions on refusal‑behavior and capability metrics, and supports calibrated or layered mitigation.
By Pratinav Seth, Saisab Sadhu, Anshul Kaushal, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu
arXiv:2501. 14940v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is essential for their safe deployment and widespread adoption.
By Guangzhi Sun, Xiao Zhan, Shutong Feng, Philip C. Woodland, Jose Such
arXiv:2605. 05427v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Refusal rates are a poor proxy for LLM safety, i.
By Alif Al Hasan, Sumon Biswas
arXiv:2606. 05614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content.
By Long P. Hoang, Hai V. Le, Shaoyang Xu, Wei Lu, Wenxuan Zhang
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:2606. 16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries.
By Ke Miao, Jiaxin Li, Hongliang Chen, Yuke Hu, Zhan Qin