arXiv Machine Learning By Muhammad Zeeshan Karamat, Christiana Chamon Garcia

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

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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.

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