Haozhong Wang, Zhuo Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Yibo Yang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, He Zhao Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO, Hongyuan Zha The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dandan Guo
The inherent safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is prone to erosion during fine-tuning, even when using seemingly innocuous datasets. While existing defenses attempt to mitigate this via data selection, they typically rely on heuristic, instance-level assessments that neglect the global geometry of the data distribution and fail to explicitly repel harmful patterns. To address this, we introduce Safety Optimal Transport (SOT), a novel framework that reframes safe fine-tuning from an instance-level filtering challenge to a distribution-level alignment task grounded in Optimal Transport (OT). At its core is a dual-reference “push-pull” weight-learning mechanism: SOT optimizes sample importance by actively pulling the downstream distribution towards a trusted safe anchor while simultaneously pushing it away from a general harmful reference. This establishes a robust geometric safety boundary that effectively purifies the training data. Extensive experiments across diverse model families and domains demonstrate that SOT significantly enhances model safety while maintaining competitive downstream performance, achieving a superior safety-utility trade-off compared to baselines.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jinhan Liu, Yibo Yang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ruiying Lu, Piotr Piękos King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Yimeng Chen King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Peng Wang, Dandan Guo
Detecting pre-training data in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for auditing data privacy and copyright compliance, yet it remains challenging in black-box, zero-shot settings where computational resources and training data are scarce. While existing likelihood-based methods have shown promise, they typically aggregate token-level scores using uniform weights, thereby neglecting the inherent information-theoretic dynamics of autoregressive generation. In this paper, we hypothesize and empirically validate that memorization signals are heavily skewed towards the high-entropy initial tokens, where model uncertainty is highest, and decay as context accumulates. To leverage this linguistic property, we introduce Positional Decay Reweighting (PDR), a training-free and plug-and-play framework. PDR explicitly reweights token-level scores to amplify distinct signals from early positions while suppressing noise from later ones. Extensive experiments show that PDR acts as a robust prior and can usually enhance a wide range of advanced methods across multiple benchmarks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表