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: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. 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
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:2512. 05518v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in the democratization of AI, yet their "open" nature introduces more avenues for malicious actors to misuse them for harmful purposes.
By Jason Vega, Gagandeep Singh
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
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: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
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: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: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
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