arXiv Machine Learning

Distilling Safe LLM Systems via Soft Prompts for On Device Settings

arXiv:2606. 09388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying safe large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained edge devices presents a critical challenge: while dual-model systems combining LLMs with guard models provide effective safety guarantees, their substantial memory and computational demands make them prohibitively expensive for on-device deployment.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

CLEAR: Continuous Latent Adapter Routing for Utility-Preserving LLM Safety Alignment

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 AI
Sep 15

An Efficient and Modular Framework for Targeted Harm Mitigation in LLMS

The paper introduces a modular correction framework for large language models that uses Activated LoRA adapters and a context-aware routing mechanism to mitigate harmful outputs. By allowing expert adapters to activate mid-sequence without invalidating the KV cache, the system achieves low-latency, targeted correction during generation. Experiments show improved alignment on safety benchmarks while maintaining task performance, presenting a lightweight, scalable approach to safer LLM deployments.

By Roberto Campbell, Momin Abbass, Muneeza Azmat, Michal Ulewicz, Raya Horesh, Kristjan Greenewald, Rog\'erio Abreu de Paula, Nathalie Baracaldo
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

How Fragile Is On-Device Language Model Safety? Localizing Safety-Critical Parameters for Sparse Fault Analysis

The paper examines the safety of small language models (SLMs) deployed on resource‑constrained, on‑device platforms, focusing on the LLaMA‑2‑7B‑Chat model. It shows that safety‑sensitive behavior is concentrated in a sparse subset of parameters, particularly the MLP down_proj layer, and that altering only 0.19% of these weights can significantly affect safety metrics while leaving overall accuracy largely unchanged. The study suggests that targeted fault analysis and selective integrity protection could improve safety for on‑device, agentic language models.

By Muhammad Zeeshan Karamat, Christiana Chamon Garcia
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Do Models Share Safety Representations? Cross-Model Steering for Safe Visual Generation

arXiv:2606. 05290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture.

By Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Sara Sarto, Florian Schiffers, Garin Kessler, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara