arXiv:2606. 03648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adapting foundation large language models to a user's task or preferred style through fine-tuning can result in compromising the model's safety.
By Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Hillary Dawkins, Isar Nejadgholi, Svetlana Kiritchenko
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
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: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
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:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.
By Jiayi Li, Kun Zhan
Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content. In this work, we reveal that this advanced safety awareness inadvertently introduces a fatal vulnerability.
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
arXiv:2606. 05614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content.
By Long P. Hoang, Hai V. Le, Shaoyang Xu, Wei Lu, Wenxuan Zhang
arXiv:2602. 16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Sasha Behrouzi, Lichao Wu, Mohamadreza Rostami, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
arXiv:2605. 05427v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Refusal rates are a poor proxy for LLM safety, i.
By Alif Al Hasan, Sumon Biswas
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