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. 12342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Domain fine-tuning degrades the safety of large language models: fine-tuned specialists readily comply with harmful prompts framed in domain language.
By Chirag Chawla, Pratinav Seth, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu
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.
EOPSA (Efficient On-Policy Self-Distilled Safety Alignment) addresses inefficiencies in On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) for safety alignment by focusing training on safety-critical tokens. It introduces Adaptive Rollout Scheduling, which limits generation length based on a Teacher Rescue Rate metric, and Selective Distillation, which filters out safety-neutral tokens to concentrate gradient updates on safety-pivotal transitions. Experiments on models up to 32B parameters show that EOPSA reduces rollout computation by about 50% and backpropagates through only roughly 2% of tokens, outperforming full-token distillation baselines in safety compliance and reasoning retention.
The paper introduces Prompt-agnostic Language Models, focusing on train‑time techniques to embed prompt robustness during instruction tuning. It shows that mixing paraphrases in training causes significant gradient interference—57% of per‑paraphrasing gradients conflict—leading to the development of two gradient‑merging methods, Prompt‑TIES and Prompt‑DARE, which resolve this interference. Experiments across four models demonstrate that these methods substantially reduce per‑example variance and improve local robustness with minimal impact on overall accuracy.
By Frederic Sadrieh
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:2609.34519v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for safety alignment, delivering dense, token-level supervision by distillin...
By Qirui Liu, Yichen Sun, Yan Wang, Yu Mi, Wei Cao, Yue Shen, Zhixuan Chu, Kui Ren
UpSafe°C is a unified framework that enhances large language model safety by upcycling safety‑critical layers into a sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts structure, with a router acting as a soft guardrail. It employs a two‑stage supervised fine‑tuning strategy to improve safety discrimination while preserving general capabilities, and introduces a safety temperature mechanism for dynamic inference‑time control of the safety‑utility trade‑off. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and model scales show robust safety improvements against harmful and jailbreak inputs while maintaining competitive general performance.
By Yuhao Sun, Zhuoer Xu, Shiwen Cui, Kun Yang, Lingyun Yu, Yongdong Zhang, Hongtao Xie
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: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:2602. 13562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While reasoning models have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, their increasing power necessitates stringent safety measures.
By Yanbo Wang, Minzheng Wang, Jian Liang, Lu Wang, Yongcan Yu, Ran He
arXiv:2608.30703v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Runtime guardrails are essential for reliable large language model (LLM) deployment, yet existing approaches typically rely on independent, external...
By Sing Team