arXiv AI By Jinghao Pang, Jitai Hao, Qiang Huang, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Yu

Beyond Refusal Patterns: Safe-Role Internalization for Robust and Generalizable LLM Safety Alignment

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The paper introduces SSRFT (Supervised Safe-Role Fine‑Tuning), a new framework that reframes safety alignment for large language models as internalizing a predefined safe role rather than relying on explicit refusal patterns. SSRFT builds a Safe‑Role Question‑Answer dataset from psychometric questions, limited jailbreak prompts, and a safe‑role description, then synthesizes and validates role‑consistent responses to expose models to diverse safety scenarios. Experiments on multiple base and instruct models demonstrate that SSRFT yields more robust and generalizable safety alignment, better resilience to prefilling attacks, improved generalization to unseen jailbreak domains, and reduced over‑refusal on benign queries while preserving general capabilities.

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