SGT: Securing Open-Source LLMs Against Malicious Fine-tuning via Safety Guidance Trigger

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission1606 Authors

Keywords: Large Language Models, AI Safety, Safety Alignment, Adversarial Robustness, Open-weight Models

Abstract: Open-weight large language models (LLMs) enable broad customization, but also increase exposure to post-release misuse, including malicious fine-tuning (MFT). To mitigate this risk, many prior defenses aim to improve the robustness of open-weight models to MFT by constraining adversarial fine-tuning dynamics in parameter space or mitigating harmful information encoded in internal representations. Nevertheless, since malicious fine-tuning can still erode safety, developing robust safeguards for open-weight models that fundamentally mitigate this risk remains an open research problem. In this paper, we characterize a safety region for open-weight LLMs and propose Safety Guidance Trigger (SGT), which guides fine-tuning toward the safety manifold to preserve alignment. SGT has two stages: (1) optimizing a safety trigger that steers the base model toward safe responses and (2) training the open-weight model to align its internal features with trigger-induced safety representations. We demonstrate that SGT substantially improves robustness against malicious fine-tuning, requiring adversaries to increase their data budget significantly to compromise safety. Our analysis shows that SGT anchors model representations to a safety region, which remains stable under malicious fine-tuning.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Safety and Alignment in LLMs

Research Area Keywords: Language Modeling

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1606