Can LLM Safety Be Ensured by Constraining Parameter Regions?
Zongmin Li, Jian Su A*STAR, Farah Benamara, Aixin Sun Nanyang Technological University
原文摘要
Large language models (LLMs) are often assumed to contain "safety regions” - parameter subsets whose modification directly influences safety behaviors. We conduct a systematic evaluation of four safety region identification methods spanning different parameter granularities, from individual weights to entire Transformer layers, across four families of backbone LLMs with varying sizes. Using ten safety identification datasets, we find that the identified safety regions exhibit only low to moderate overlap, as measured by IoU. The overlap drops significantly when the safety regions are further refined using utility datasets (i.e. non-harmful queries). These results suggest that current techniques fail to reliably identify a stable, dataset-agnostic safety region.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表