arXiv AI By Yixin Tan, Zhe Yu, Rui Wen, Jun Sakuma

One Leak Away: How Pretrained Model Exposure Amplifies Jailbreak Risks in Finetuned LLMs

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arXiv:2512. 14751v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Finetuning pretrained large language models (LLMs) has become the standard paradigm for developing downstream applications.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

A Single Suffix to Break Them All: Basin-Aware Jailbreaks for Merged Model Families

The paper investigates safety risks in model merging, showing that even when all constituent models are individually safety‑aligned, merging can expose a jailbreak vulnerability rooted in the pretrained foundation model. It introduces Basin‑Aware Jailbreak (BAJ), a min–max optimization method that generates adversarial suffixes transferable across merged models sharing the same backbone, without needing the exact merging coefficients or checkpoints. Experiments demonstrate BAJ’s high transfer success rates across diverse backbones and merging settings, and its resilience against existing defenses.

By Yu Zhe, Yixin Tan, Junhao Wei, Wang Chen