Beyond Average Safety: Chance-Constrained LLM Fine-tuning
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.29960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models on new objectives can improve helpfulness, instruction following, or domain-specific performance, but it can also induce regressions on safety-critical prompts. Existing safety-preserving fine-tuning methods typically control average safety loss or use weighted auxiliary penalties, which can obscure rare but severe failures. We propose a chance-constrained formulation for safety-preserving fine-tuning that limits the fraction of safety examples whose degradation relative to a reference model exceeds a prescribe
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.29960v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models on new objectives can improve helpfulness, instruction following, or domain-specific performance, but it can also induce regressions on safety-critical prompts.
- Existing safety-preserving fine-tuning methods typically control average safety loss or use weighted auxiliary penalties, which can obscure rare but severe failures.
- We propose a chance-constrained formulation for safety-preserving fine-tuning that limits the fraction of safety examples whose degradation relative to a reference model exceeds a prescribe
Why it matters
“Beyond Average Safety: Chance-Constrained LLM Fine-tuning” shows why AI risk cannot be reduced to answer accuracy. Access controls, logging, human approval and incident response need to be designed into the workflow from the start.

Member comments