Safer Content or Firmer Refusals? A Hybrid Perturbation Defense for Alignment under Harmful Fine-tuning

Fine-tuning-as-a-service lets users adapt a safety-aligned language model to their own data, but it also creates a harmful fine-tuning attack surface: a small amount of harmful data mixed into an otherwise benign fine-tuning set can degrade the model's alignment. Two recent alignment-stage defenses