Do as I do (Safely): Mitigating Task-Specific Fine-tuning Risks in Large Language Models
Keywords: large language models, safety, fine-tuning
TL;DR: We study fine-tuning risks associated with task-specific fine-tuning, showing malicious users can increase harmfulness by modifying almost any task-specific dataset and providing a novel mitigation strategy based on mimicking user data.
Abstract: Recent research shows that fine-tuning on benign instruction-following data can inadvertently undo the safety alignment process and increase a model's propensity to comply with harmful queries. While instruction-following fine-tuning is important, task-specific fine-tuning-where models are trained on datasets with clear ground truth answers (e.g., multiple choice questions)-can enhance model performance on specialized downstream tasks. Understanding and mitigating safety risks in the task-specific setting remains distinct from the instruction-following context due to structural differences in the data. Our work demonstrates how malicious actors can subtly manipulate the structure of almost *any* task-specific dataset to foster significantly more dangerous model behaviors, while maintaining an appearance of innocuity and reasonable downstream task performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel mitigation strategy that mixes in safety data which *mimics* the task format and prompting style of the user data, showing this is significantly more effective and efficient than existing baselines at re-establishing safety alignment while maintaining similar task performance.
Primary Area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
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Submission Number: 3608
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