arXiv:2608.21570v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deploying a safety layer for large language models on commodity hardware is constrained by the guards available to do it: current open guard models hol...
By Edson Rodrigues da Cruz Filho, Paulo Ricardo Ferreira Neves, Paulo Henrique Eleuterio Falsetti, Jo\~ao Vitor Pavan, Ian Degaspari, Henrique Vieira Laturrague, Patrick Vieira Laturrague, Guilherme Nielsen Dias, Marccello Wilson Perez Berto, Gustavo Voltani Von Atzingen
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.
arXiv:2609.15886v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often learn both desirable and undesirable properties during post-training. We study whether midtraining, an earlier train...
By Kyle O'Brien, Edward James Young, Puria Radmard, Nathalie Kirch, Cameron Tice, Tomek Korbak, David Demitri Africa
The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.
By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz
arXiv:2610.07654v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has attracted growing attention as an effective way to transfer capabilities from teacher models to student models. Rece...
By Jian Luo, Kehan Qi, Qingqiao Hu, Meilong Xu, Jiacheng Qiu, Weimin Lyu, Jiawei Zhou, Chao Chen
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:2506.07356v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While Finetuning-as-a-Service (FaaS) enables customization of Large Language Models (LLMs) using user data, this service is vulnerable to safety de...
By Seokil Ham, Yubin Choi, Yujin Yang, Seungju Cho, Younghun Kim, Changick Kim
The paper introduces two distillation methods for handling misaligned AI models. Distillation for Incrimination (DFI) transfers misalignment without the ability to conceal it, making students more likely to admit hidden behaviors. Distillation for Capabilities (DFC) transfers useful capabilities while minimizing misalignment, using techniques like inoculation prompting and focused training.
By Sebastian Prasanna, Jacqueline Tay, Alek Westover
arXiv:2607. 18639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety interventions on dual-use knowledge typically choose between destroying hazardous content (e.
By Seunghyun Lee, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
arXiv:2609.06934v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Post-hoc safety training (RLHF, DPO) is the dominant way to align large language models, yet jailbreaks (Zou et al., 2023b), fine-tuning attacks (Qi...
By Srikanth Malla, Chiho Choi, Joon Hee Choi
Safety interventions on dual-use knowledge typically choose between destroying hazardous content (e. g.
arXiv:2609.36734v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) trains a smaller-capacity student model to imitate a larger-capacity teacher model by matching output distributions, implic...
By Ayan Sengupta, Vaibhav Seth, Tanmoy Chakraborty