arXiv Computation and Language By Alejo L\'opez-\'Avila, Iker Garc\'ia-Ferrero, Jezabel Garcia, Antonio Tiene, Rom\'an Or\'us

Safety for Whom? Boundary-Aware Self-Distillation for Controlled LLM Safety Refusal

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The paper introduces a boundary-aware self‑distillation framework for controlled large language model safety refusal, addressing the need for different refusal boundaries within the same topic. It combines controlled topic generation, coverage repair, in‑distribution compensation data, and harmful‑benign pairs to train and evaluate refusal behavior. Experiments on Qwen3‑8B show that escalating retries dramatically improve target‑domain refusal rates while reducing unsafe responses, though they also increase over‑refusal, highlighting the trade‑off between safety and usability.

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