arXiv AI

Cat-DPO: Category-Adaptive Safety Alignment

arXiv:2604. 17299v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aligning large language models with human preferences must balance two competing goals: responding helpfully to legitimate requests and reliably refusing harmful ones.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Suan: Rectifying Direct Preference Safety Alignment in Large Language Models

The paper introduces Suan, a new preference optimization algorithm designed to improve safety alignment in large language models. Suan operates directly at the gradient level, avoiding traditional variational derivations, which yields more interpretable and robust training dynamics. Experiments show that Suan outperforms existing methods, achieving superior safety alignment while maintaining response utility.

By Oleksandr Cherednichenko, Roman Klypa
arXiv AI
Jun 16

CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment

arXiv:2606. 15396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns.

By Wenbo Yu, Bohua Wang, Hao Fang, Kuofeng Gao, Jingru Zeng, Xiaochen Yang, Tianyi Zhang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Jiawei Kong, Hao Wu, Bin Chen, Shu-Tao Xia, Min Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 24

CLEAR: Continuous Latent Adapter Routing for Utility-Preserving LLM Safety Alignment

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
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Oyster-II: Reinforcement Learning for Constructive Safety Alignment in Large Language Models

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
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Preference Data Selection for Mitigating the Alignment Tax in Large Language Models

The paper introduces BALIGN, a balanced data selection strategy designed to reduce catastrophic forgetting—referred to as the alignment tax—in large language models during preference-based alignment. By analyzing preference optimization gradients, the authors identify three data-centric features that influence parameter drift: the reference model's log-probability margin, token length differences between chosen and rejected responses, and TF‑IDF similarity to general capability corpora. BALIGN aggregates these features into a composite risk score to filter out high-risk preference samples, thereby preserving foundational capabilities while maintaining alignment gains with minimal computational overhead.

By Minsu Kim, Jianxun Lian, Xing Xie, Steven Euijong Whang