arXiv:2609.00624v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A prominent paradigm in inference-time alignment employs lightweight supervisors to steer Large Language Models (LLMs). Through empirical analysis, we...
By Zeen Zhu, Zhuo Li, Weiyang Guo, Liye Zhao, Haibing Di, Yequan Wang, Jing Li
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
Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically depends on high-quality supervision data, such as safe demonstrations or preference pairs. However, in real-world deployment, emerging safety requirements are often specified as natural-language policies, while corresponding supervision data may be costly, delayed, or unavailable.
arXiv:2606. 11201v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions.
By Jin Gan, Xin Li, Jun Luo
arXiv:2606. 02530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values often degrades their general capabilities, termed the alignment tax.
By Hao Li, Jingkun An, Zijun Song, Pengyu Zhu, Rui Li, Hao Wang, Wendi Feng, Yesheng Liu, Lijun Li, Jin-Ge Yao, Lei Sha
arXiv:2608.30319v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) finetuned for specialized domains represent crucial high-impact applications. Inference-time alignment improves safety d...
By Jin Gan, Xin Li, Jun Luo
arXiv:2607. 20515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is critical for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences.
By Jingyi Huang, Ruohan Zong, Yujun Feng, Liran Ma, Lanyu Shang, Yang Zhang
The paper investigates how different training strategies affect the prompt sensitivity of large language models. It reproduces and compares methods such as refined data construction and robustness objectives, finding that while robustness fine‑tuning improves over standard fine‑tuning and in‑context learning, the prompt gap remains large (40–57%). Notably, newer techniques like CoIN and PPCL often underperform a simple data‑construction approach that uses one template per batch, and diagnostics suggest that mixed‑template batches force the optimizer to reconcile conflicting updates rather than learn a prompt‑agnostic representation.
By Frederic Sadrieh, Michal \v{S}tef\'anik
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
Domain fine-tuning degrades the safety of large language models: fine-tuned specialists readily comply with harmful prompts framed in domain language. Existing inference-time defenses that mix logits from a safe anchor model require both models to share a vocabulary, which rules them out for the cross-family specialists where safety is most degraded.
arXiv:2508.20766v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) often involves mediating internal representations to refuse harmful requests. Recent researc...
By Harethah Abu Shairah, Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, George Turkiyyah, Bernard Ghanem
arXiv:2606. 09635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) under distribution drift requires inference-time adaptation.
By Hankun Lin, Ruqi Zhang