arXiv AI

Making Your LLMs More Objective: Stabilizing LLM Safety Behavior Across Traits with Trait-Invariant Safety Tuning

arXiv:2608. 11705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligned large language models (LLMs) are expected to exhibit safety behavior based on the content of the user request: they should refuse unsafe requests and comply with safe ones.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Beyond Average Safety: Chance-Constrained LLM Fine-tuning

The paper introduces a chance-constrained approach to fine‑tune large language models (LLMs) that limits the proportion of safety examples whose performance degrades beyond a set threshold relative to a reference model. By replacing the discontinuous violation indicator with a differentiable majorization, the authors derive a tractable, conservative constraint and a closed‑form, constraint‑aware gradient update that focuses on examples near or above the degradation threshold. Experiments on harmful fine‑tuning across three tasks and models show that this tail‑aware method consistently outperforms existing safety‑preserving baselines, suggesting that safety preservation should be treated as a reliability‑constrained optimization problem rather than average‑risk regularization.

By Taha Entesari, Mahyar Fazlyab
arXiv AI
Jun 9

When Behavioral Safety Evaluation Fails: A Representation-Level Perspective

arXiv:2606. 08044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) safety has often been evaluated at the behavior level, which provides limited evidence of internal robustness, as these evaluations target outputs rather than representation-level vulnerability under intervention.

By Enyi Jiang, Anders Gj{\o}lbye, Yibo Jacky Zhang, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Beyond Routine Compliance: Cunning Data Cultivates Safety Vigilance in Large Language Models

The paper introduces "cunning questions"—non‑safety prompts that contain misleading premises or subtle inconsistencies—to train large language models (LLMs) to scrutinize underlying intent and assumptions. Experiments show that incorporating these questions improves robustness against out‑of‑distribution jailbreak attacks and enhances subsequent safety fine‑tuning, achieving a new state‑of‑the‑art reduction in mean ASR from 17.40% to 15.05% across nine backbone–benchmark combinations. The authors argue that this training fosters vigilance, enabling models to prioritize safety judgments before engaging in harmful planning.

By Youjia Wang, Lin Xu, Yang Sun, Yuxiao Lu, Chengfang Fang, Jie Shi