arXiv AI

Turning the Spell Around: Lightweight Alignment Amplification via Rank-One Safety Injection

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
Oct 1

Faithful Dual-constrained Erasure for Robust LLM Safety Alignment

The paper introduces FDCU, a dual‑constrained subspace projection framework designed to improve machine unlearning for large language models. FDCU limits parameter updates with a dual‑masking rule that preserves general knowledge via Fisher Information while preventing the activation of spurious suppressors through the Principle of Minimal Functional Intervention. Experiments show that FDCU achieves state‑of‑the‑art robustness against retraining attacks while maintaining near‑lossless general utility, thereby ensuring durable safety for LLMs.

By Jiaqing Li, Shide Zhou, Zhibo Zhang, Yuxi Li, Tianlong Yu, Kailong Wang
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 Machine Learning
Jun 25

RAS: Measuring LLM Safety Through Refusal Alignment

arXiv:2606. 25750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is commonly performed by querying models with unsafe or jailbreak prompts and judging whether their outputs violate a safety policy.

By Chang-Chieh Huang, Yan-Lun Chen, Chia-Mu Yu, Wei-Bin Lee
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

PRISM: Transfer and Limits of Activation Interventions in Tool-Calling Language Models

PRISM is a framework that evaluates how activation interventions transfer across precision, languages, and model scales to mitigate unsafe tool‑calling behaviors in language models. By leveraging lower‑resource settings such as quantized NF4 labels and cross‑lingual transfer, PRISM demonstrates that alignment improvements can be achieved with minimal scenarios and that these gains transfer to held‑out languages and larger models. The study shows that auxiliary supervision from compressed models and multilingual data can effectively uncover and reduce hazardous tool‑calling behaviors across different model families.

By Giovana Kerche Bon\'as, Thales Sales Almeida, Marcelo da Silva Reis, Rodrigo Nogueira, Marcos Meideiros Raimundo