NeuronGuard: Robust LLM Safety Alignment via Ablation-Aware Safety Signal Redistribution

NeuronGuard is a fine‑tuning defense for large language models that hardens them against both jailbreak and neuron‑level attacks. It redistributes safety signals across many neurons by identifying safety‑critical ones with per‑layer linear classifiers, enforcing refusal behavior when those neurons are ablated, and applying KL‑divergence regularization for consistency. A randomized gradient projection preserves task performance, and the authors provide a formal guarantee that NeuronGuard lowers the attack success rate upper bound, with experiments showing near‑zero success rates across multiple models and attack strategies.

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• llms
• fine-tuning
• multimodal
• benchmarks
• safety