DataShield: Uncovering Risky Fine-Tuning Data Across LLMs Through Consensus Subspace Alignment
arXiv:2607.15081v1 [cs.CR] 16 Jul 2026
Zefeng Wu1, * , Weiwei Qi1, * , Jielong Chen3 , Tianhang Zheng1,2,† , Di Hong1 , Chaochao Lu4 , Liang He5 , Zhan Qin1,2 , Kui Ren1,2 1 The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University 2 Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security 3 UESTC 4 Shanghai AI Laboratory 5 East China Normal University {zefengwu, weiweiqi, zthzheng, hongd, qinzhan, kuiren}@zju.edu.cn [email protected], [email protected] [email protected] fail under downstream task adaptation (Wei et al., Abstract Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on domain-specific datasets has become a standard paradigm for adapting LLMs to specialized applications. However, recent work has shown that even fine-tuning on benign task-specific data can substantially weaken the safety capabilities of LLMs. While existing efforts have made progress in identifying data responsible for safety degradation, they usually rely on a single mean vector computed over a specific model with its tokenizer to represent the safety direction, which limits both the effectiveness and transferability of their risk assessment measures. To address these limitations, we propose DataShield, a data assessment framework that identifies risky fine-tuning samples and response segments through consensus subspace alignment over joint safety-critical semantic spaces derived from multiple safety-aligned LLMs.Within these spaces, DataShield extracts consensus safe and unsafe subspaces using semantic spectral decomposition over safe and unsafe data representations. The risk of a data sample or segment is then estimated by measuring its relative alignment with the unsafe and safe subspaces, enabling both samplelevel filtering and fine-grained segment-level masking. Compared with state-of-the-art filtering and masking baselines, DataShield reduces ASR by 14.6% with sample filtering and 32.3% with segment masking, while preserving downstream utility and avoiding target-modelspecific risk computation. 1
1
Introduction
Although most recent LLMs are safetyaligned (Ouyang et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2022; Bianchi et al., 2024), their safety capabilities remain fragile: alignment can degrade or completely * Equal contribution. †
Corresponding author. Our code is available at: ZJU-LLM-Safety/DataShield. 1
https://github.com/
2023; Qi et al., 2024; Huang et al., 2024, 2025a). In particular, recent studies show that fine-tuning on normal task data can unexpectedly increase model compliance with harmful queries (Qi et al., 2024; He et al., 2024; Guan et al., 2025; Hsiung et al., 2025). This vulnerability poses a significant challenge to practical LLM deployment: how can we improve the downstream utility of aligned LLMs while preserving their safety capabilities? To address this challenge, recent methods aim to mitigate safety degradation through safety-aware fine-tuning (Hsu et al., 2024; Li et al., 2025b; Choi et al., 2024) or data-centric filtering strategies (Choi et al., 2024; He et al., 2024; Li et al., 2025a; Shen et al., 2025; Wang et al., 2026). Among them, datacentric methods commonly operate at either the sample level (He et al., 2024; Guan et al., 2025; Li et al., 2025a; Shen et al., 2025) or the token level (Li et al., 2026). Sample-level filtering estimates the risks of entire training examples using model-specific signals, such as representations, gradients, or optimization-based criteria (Xia et al., 2024; Li et al., 2025a; Shen et al., 2025). In contrast, token-level filtering identifies risky tokens within a sample by estimating token-level risk with a pair of reference models (Li et al., 2026). Although data filtering can mitigate safety degradation, existing methods still have several limitations in practical use. First, existing methods usually provide model-specific risk estimates, which limits both their transferability across different LLMs. For instance, Llama may assign a low risk score to a cybersecurity example on privilege escalation if the text appears to provide benign technical assistance. But this data sample can increase harmful-request compliance in Qwen or other models after fine-tuning. Second, most existing methods rely on a single mean vector computed over model hidden states or gradients to represent the safety direction for risk estimation, while the safety seman-
tics may span across different hidden directions or subspaces. Third, token-level risk estimation methods usually tie unsafe text regions to a specific model tokenizer, which also limits their applicability to other model (Li et al., 2026). Since different LLMs may split the same risky text differently, token-level masks may not remain reliable when reused across target models (Erdogan et al., 2026; Haslett, 2025; Phan et al., 2025; Dao et al., 2026). For example, the same semantic span may correspond to different token boundaries across models ("malware" -> "mal" and "ware"). In practice, the above limitations either limit the effectiveness of data filtering or create a significant cost barrier, especially for some widely-used fine-tuning datasets(Chung et al., 2024; Longpre et al., 2023). To address these limitations, we propose DataShield, a data-centric framework that estimates the safety degradation risk of fine-tuning data through consensus subspace alignment. Regarding the first two limitations, DataShield uses semantic spectral decomposition to construct consensus safe and unsafe subspaces from the safety-critical representations of multiple LLMs with different architectures, capturing diverse safety-related directions rather than a single prototype vector. DataShield then derives a risk estimate for each fine-tuning sample based on its relative alignment with the unsafe and safe subspaces, yielding a more robust risk measure that can also be reused across target models. To overcome the third limitation, DataShield divides a data sample into tokenizer-independent text segments, allowing risk to be assigned to semantic spans rather than entire examples or model-specific tokens. Since autoregressive hidden states entangle local segment information with preceding context, naive segment scoring may propagate unsafe signals into later benign content. Thus, DataShield introduces autoregressive risk decoupling, which measures the additional risk contributed by each segment beyond its preceding context, enabling more accurate masking of risky segments. Our results show that DataShield is not merely transferable across target models, but also provides a stronger safety-risk measure than target-modeldependent baselines. Compared with state-of-theart filtering and masking baselines, DataShield reduces ASR by 14.6% with sample filtering and 32.3% with segment masking, maintaining a better safety-utility trade-off across different models. Notably, even if the baselines use the target model for risky data filtering, whereas DataShield employs
other models for the same task, DataShield still can achieve better performance than these baselines on the target model. Our main contributions are summarized as follows: • We construct consensus safe and unsafe subspaces instead of single vectors from multiple LLMs for characterizing fine-tuning data risk, which improves the effectiveness and transferability of risk assessment across LLMs. • We introduce a tokenizer-agnostic segmentlevel risk localization mechanism, enabling transferable masking of high-risk semantic text spans across different tokenizers. • Extensive experiments show that DataShield improves fine-tuning safety with limited utility loss, lowering average ASR by 14.6% under sample filtering and 32.3% under segment masking compared with SOTA baselines.
2
Related Work
Recent data-centric studies suggest that a small subset of fine-tuning data (Guan et al., 2025; Hsiung et al., 2025) can cause severe safety degradation. Bi-Anchoring (He et al., 2024) identifies the risky data using representations and gradients. LARF (Li et al., 2025a) scores training data with hidden states from safety-related layers. SEAL (Shen et al., 2025) trains a safety classifier to estimate degradation risk, but requires target-model logits, adding cost and target-model dependence. SOT (Wang et al., 2026) learns sample weights by aligning downstream data with safe references and separating it from harmful ones. These methods rely on model-specific signals or scoring models, limiting transferability across architectures. TOSS (Li et al., 2026) improves granularity by masking unsafe content at the token level, but its masks depend on the reference model tokenizer. Since tokenizers may split the same text differently, these masks may not transfer reliably across models. DataShield addresses these limitations by estimating risk from safety-relevant subspaces across multiple safetyaligned models and masking unsafe content at the transferable segment level.
3
Problem Formulation
Safety-preserving data filtering. Let z = (x, y) denote a fine-tuning sample, where x is an instruction and y is a response, and let Dtask = {zi }ni=1
Building Consensus Safe and Unsafe Subspaces
Joint Safety-Critical Semantic Spaces Safe refusal
Harmful instruction
Unsafe output
Extract last token hidden states
...
Llama
Select top-N critical layers
k=K
...
Safe subspace
Sample
Response
Reusable across target models Token
k=K
Unsafe subspace
Aggregate into segment Fliter high risk
Build safety-relevant subspaces from multiple models
Reusable core-filtered data across architectures and tokenizers
Segment-Level Alignment Risk
k=1
...
Mistral
Semantic spectral decomposition
DataShield-Sp DataShield-Sm （segment （sample masking） filtering）
Alignment score
Sample-Level Alignment Risk k=2
Qwen
Consensus unsafe subspace
k=2
...
K models
Consensus safe subspace
k=1
...
Overrefusal dataset
Per-model subspaces（for each k）
...
Paired probing data
Safety-Preserving Fine-Tuning
Low risk
Deep seek
Mini Max
GLM
Lower ASR for harmful behaviors
Segment
Mask high risk
Preserve downstream utility
MASK
High risk
Gemma
Figure 1: Overview of DataShield. DataShield constructs safety-critical semantic spaces from multiple safetyaligned LLMs, establishes joint safe and unsafe subspaces, and estimates sample-level and segment-level alignment risks. The resulting high-risk samples or semantic segments are filtered or masked before fine-tuning, producing reusable safety-preserving data across different target architectures and tokenizers. (1)
(K)
denote a downstream fine-tuning dataset. We consider data-centric safety-preserving filtering, which estimates the safety-degradation risk of training units before fine-tuning. A training unit can be either an entire sample zi or a response segment ci,j in yi . The goal is to reduce data samples or segments that may weaken model safety while preserving the useful supervision signals for downstream adaptation (Qi et al., 2024; Li et al., 2025a).
source models Msrc = {Msrc , . . . , Msrc }, which are used to estimate the safety risk of each data. (1) (J) The target models Mtgt = {Mtgt , . . . , Mtgt } are not used during risk estimation. Our goal is to filter out risky examples that may cause safety degradation, enabling the filtered dataset to preserve safety across target models.
Transferability requirement. A fine-tuning dataset may be reused across LLMs with different architectures, scales, safety behaviors, and tokenizers (Chung et al., 2024; Longpre et al., 2023). A risk measure derived from a single model’s hidden states, gradients, losses, logits, or token boundaries only reflects the representation geometry or tokenizer of the inspection model, rather than the safety risk carried by the data itself (Kornblith et al., 2019; Bostrom and Durrett, 2020; Erdogan et al., 2026; Haslett, 2025). Consequently, a sample assigned low estimated risk under one model may still weaken the safety capability of another model after fine-tuning. A practical safety filter should produce risk measures that transfer across different model versions and families.
Figure 1 illustrates the workflow of DataShield. DataShield builds safe and unsafe subspaces from several safety aligned source models, and uses the consensus signal across source models to assess fine tuning data. For each sample or response segment, DataShield computes a risk measure by comparing its alignment with the unsafe subspaces and the safe subspaces. Samples with larger risk measures are removed, while response segments with larger risk measures are masked during target model fine tuning.
Transferable safety-preserving filtering. We study safety-preserving data filtering for maintaining safety across models. The filter has access to the task dataset Dtask and a set of safety-aligned
4
4.1
Method
Consensus Safe and Unsafe Subspaces
Existing methods typically characterize safe and unsafe behavior using the mean hidden states of safe and unsafe examples from a single LLM layer. A single mean vector is a limited representation since it cannot capture the multiple directions associated with safety capabilities, and a single layer may fail to characterize all safety-relevant signals
distributed across different models. Identifying Safety-Critical Latent Spaces. We use a set of safety-aligned source models Msrc = (1) (K) {Msrc , . . . , Msrc } to obtain safety-critical rep(k) resentations. For each source model Msrc , DataShield identifies safety-critical layers using the weight-perturbation method of (Li et al., 2025a,c): the weights of each layer are symmetrically scaled, and the resulting change in refusal tendency is measured on a widely used probing dataset (Li et al., 2025a). DataShield ranks all layers by perturbation sensitivity and selects the top Ncrit layers as (k) the critical layer set Lcrit . Details of the layersensitivity test are in Appendix A.1.
tor: Sa(k) =
1
X
(k) |Ha |
h̃h̃⊤ ,
a ∈ A.
(2)
(k) h̃∈Ha
(k)
Since Sa is symmetric positive semidefinite matrix, DataShield can apply semantic spectral decomposition by decomposing it into orthonormal eigen-directions: Sa(k) =
Dk X
(k) (k) (k)⊤
λa,j va,j va,j ,
(3)
j=1 (k)
(k)
Ua(k) = [va,1 , . . . , va,d ],
a ∈ A. (k)
Joint Safety-Critical Semantic Spaces. The selected layers define a safety-critical representation space for each source model. Given an input (k) sample z, DataShield feeds z into Msrc and ex(k) tracts representations from the layers in Lcrit . Let (k) hℓ (z) denote the representation obtained from (k) layer ℓ ∈ Lcrit . DataShield combines the representations from the selected layers to obtain a compact safety-critical representation h̃(k) (z) ∈ RDk , where Dk is the compact representation dimension for the k-th source model. The exact construction is given in Appendix A.3. These source-model spaces are not forced into a shared embedding space, since different LLMs may use different internal bases. Instead, DataShield forms a joint safetycritical view by computing alignment measures within each source-model space and aggregating the resulting scores across models.
where the eigenvalues are sorted as λa,1 ≥ · · · ≥
Extracting Consensus Safe and Unsafe Subspaces. DataShield follows the paired probing setup used in prior work (Li et al., 2025a). Each harmful instruction is paired with an unsafe completion and a safe response. We denote the unsafe and safe probing sets as Dunsafe and Dsafe , respectively. Let A = {safe, unsafe} denote the two behavior (k) labels. For each source model Msrc and each label a ∈ A, DataShield feeds each probing sample (k) z ∈ Da into Msrc and extracts the compact safety critical representation at the last token, denoted by h̃(k) (z). The representation set for behavior label a is Ha(k) = {h̃(k) (z) | z ∈ Da }. (1)
Since U ⊤ U = I, ϕ(h̃, U ) ∈ [0, 1] for any nonzero h̃. The measure is the normalized squared length of the projection of h̃ onto the subspace spanned by U . A larger value indicates stronger alignment with that subspace.
(k)
For each representation set Ha , DataShield constructs a behavior-specific safety-semantic opera-
(k)
(k)
4.2
Risk Estimation via Subspace Alignment
λa,Dk . The columns of Ua form an orthonormal basis for behavior a in the representation space of (k) Msrc . For each source model, DataShield keeps (k) (k) one safe basis Usafe and one unsafe basis Uunsafe . The bases remain in their original model spaces, without forcing different models into a shared representation space.
DataShield estimates the safety-degradation risk of fine-tuning data from its relative alignment with the unsafe and safe subspaces. Given a compact hidden representation h̃ and an orthonormal basis U , we define the subspace alignment measure as ϕ(h̃, U ) =
∥U U ⊤ h̃∥22 . ∥h̃∥22
(4)
Sample-Level Risk Measure. Following representation based filtering work (Wang et al., 2026; Li et al., 2025a), we use the last-token compact hidden state as the sequence representation. For (k) (k) source model Msrc , let h̃seq (zi ) denote the compact sequence representation of sample zi . We define the sample-level alignment gap as (k) (k) ssample (zi ) =ϕ h̃(k) (z ), U seq i unsafe (5) (k) − ϕ h̃(k) (z ), U . seq i safe
(k)
Here, ssample (zi ) ∈ [−1, 1], where larger values indicate greater alignment with the unsafe subspace relative to the safe subspace. DataShield averages the K alignment gaps to obtain the consensus sample-level risk measure:
r̂sample (zi ) =
1 K
K X
(k)
ssample (zi ).
(6)
and averages the measure across source models: K
r̂seg (ci,j ; xi , yi ) =
1 X (k) max ∆qt . (7) K t∈T (k) (ci,j ) k=1
The maximum is used instead of the mean because a short risky span can be diluted by nearby benign text.
k=1
4.3 The resulting r̂sample (zi ) ∈ [−1, 1], with larger values indicating higher sample-level safetydegradation risk. Segment Level Risk Measure. DataShield also measures risk over response segments. For each sample zi = (xi , yi ), DataShield keeps the instruction xi unchanged and segments the response yi into raw text spans C(yi ) = [ci,1 , ci,2 , . . . , ci,mi ] before model tokenization. In our implementation, the segmenter uses sentence boundaries, punctuation marks, line breaks, and whitespace to identify character spans. The character spans are independent of model tokenizers. Standard NLP tools (Bird et al., 2009; Honnibal et al., 2020) can replace the segmenter if they return character spans before tokenization. Details of segment construction and token mapping are given in Appendix A.5. For (k) each source model Msrc , DataShield tokenizes the full sequence [xi ; yi ] with the corresponding tokenizer and maps each response segment ci,j to a token index set T (k) (ci,j ) by character span overlap. All source models therefore evaluate the same response spans, although their token bound(k) aries can differ. Let qt denote the unsafe versus safe alignment gap at position t, computed (k) (k) (k) (k) from ϕ(h̃t (zi ), Uunsafe ) and ϕ(h̃t (zi ), Usafe ). (k) A larger qt ∈ [−1, 1] indicates stronger unsafe alignment relative to safe alignment under the preceding context. Autoregressive hidden states contain preceding (k) tokens, so risky content can keep qt high at (k) later benign positions. Directly pooling qt over a segment can transfer earlier risk to later text. To reduce this carry-over effect, DataShield uses (k) (k) (k) (k) ∆qt = 21 (qt − qt−1 ), with q0 = 0, as the incremental alignment measure at position t. The (k) factor 1/2 keeps ∆qt in [−1, 1]. DataShield then assigns each segment the largest incremental alignment measure inside the segment
Safety-Preserving Fine-Tuning
Sample removal. Given an intervention budget ρ, DataShield removes the global top-ρ fraction of samples ranked by r̂sample and fine-tunes the target e sp . model on the remaining dataset D task Segment loss masking. Following prior finegrained filtering and loss-masking practice (Li et al., 2026), DataShield applies the same global top-ρ budget to response segments ranked by r̂seg . The text sequence is kept unchanged, while targetmodel tokens overlapping the selected raw-text segments are excluded from the SFT loss: Lsm (θ) = −
XX i
log pθ (yi,t | xi , yi,<t ), (8)
t∈Ki
where Ki denotes the unmasked token positions under the target-model tokenizer for sample zi .
5
Experiments
5.1
Setup
Models. We construct consensus safety subspaces from three safety-aligned source models: Llama3-8B-Instruct (Grattafiori et al., 2024), Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (Hui et al., 2024), and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (Jiang et al., 2024). These LLMs are selected to provide safety-relevant representation spaces across various model families and tokenizers. We test cross-architecture transfer on four unseen instruction-tuned target LLMs: Phi3-medium-4k-it (Abdin et al., 2024), Qwen34B-it (Yang et al., 2025a), Gemma2-27B-it (Team et al., 2024), Gemma3-12B-it (Team et al., 2024). Datasets. Following prior work (Li et al., 2025a; He et al., 2024), we fine-tune target models on Alpaca (Taori et al., 2023) and Dolly (Conover et al., 2023) for domain adaptation. We evaluate safety on HEx-PHI (Qi et al., 2024) and HarmBench (Mazeika et al., 2024), and evaluate utility on a test subset of SLIMORCA (Lian et al., 2023).
Data Method
Phi3-medium-4k-it
Qwen3-4B-it
Gemma2-27B-it
Gemma3-12B-it
Dolly
Alpaca
PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ SLM (%)↑ PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ SLM (%)↑ PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ SLM (%)↑ PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ SLM (%)↑ Standard SFT 62.0 Random-Sp 59.1 SEAL 34.2 Bi-Anchor 37.1 LARF 26.3 SOT 25.1 DataShield-Sp 17.2↓44.8
76.0 70.2 42.5 45.2 34.1 32.8 23.5↓52.5
68.2 66.5 65.8 65.4 66.2 66.0 67.8↓0.4
32.1 29.5 19.8 23.1 18.6 17.5 11.4↓20.7
39.0 36.8 27.1 31.0 26.2 24.8 14.7↓24.3
65.4 63.8 63.0 62.8 63.5 63.3 64.9↓0.5
44.1 41.8 32.4 28.2 22.7 21.6 16.1↓28.0
51.3 49.2 39.1 35.8 30.1 29.2 23.8↓27.5
72.5 70.8 70.1 69.8 70.5 70.3 72.1↓0.4
24.2 22.1 15.6 14.1 13.2 12.5 8.8↓15.4
31.1 29.3 22.2 18.2 19.8 18.1 11.5↓19.6
69.8 68.2 67.5 67.1 67.9 67.8 69.4↓0.4
Random-Sm 58.2 TOSS 39.5 DataShield-Sm 11.2↓50.8
68.7 47.1 17.1↓58.9
66.1 65.5 67.3↓0.9
35.5 38.2 10.1↓22.0
42.8 46.1 16.2↓22.8
63.2 62.5 64.4↓1.0
45.1 44.2 14.1↓30.0
53.2 52.1 23.1↓28.2
70.2 69.5 71.6↓0.9
28.1 33.6 8.4↓15.8
35.2 40.8 12.6↓18.5
67.6 66.8 68.9↓0.9
Standard SFT 64.5 Random-Sp 61.8 SEAL 36.2 Bi-Anchor 38.6 LARF 28.1 SOT 26.7 DataShield-Sp 19.1↓45.4
78.5 73.1 43.8 47.1 35.6 34.2 25.2↓53.3
66.5 64.8 64.0 63.6 64.5 64.3 66.1↓0.4
34.6 27.2 20.8 25.2 19.3 18.2 7.6↓27.0
42.5 34.8 28.1 32.7 28.5 27.1 16.1↓26.4
63.8 62.1 61.3 61.0 61.8 61.6 63.4↓0.4
55.1 42.3 32.8 29.1 24.6 23.1 10.2↓44.9
63.2 49.8 40.2 36.8 32.2 30.8 18.6↓44.6
70.8 69.1 68.4 68.1 68.8 68.6 70.4↓0.4
31.2 22.7 16.5 12.2 18.1 16.6 5.5↓25.7
38.4 29.3 23.1 18.8 21.3 20.2 11.6↓26.8
68.1 66.4 65.6 65.3 66.1 65.9 67.7↓0.4
Random-Sm 61.2 TOSS 42.1 DataShield-Sm 12.1↓52.4
71.8 49.6 18.6↓59.9
64.2 63.5 65.5↓1.0
38.8 40.2 6.5↓28.1
46.2 48.1 22.6↓19.9
61.5 60.8 62.8↓1.0
47.3 45.8 13.1↓42.0
55.2 53.7 27.6↓35.6
68.5 67.8 69.8↓1.0
29.7 36.2 6.4↓24.8
36.8 43.3 18.1↓20.3
65.8 65.1 67.1↓1.0
Table 1: Transfer across target architectures. Compared with SOTA baselines, DataShield reduces PHI and HARM more effectively and obtains better utility on Alpaca and Dolly across four target models. Standard SFT shows slightly better utility because it uses the full training set, whereas DataShield filters or masks part of the data to reduce risky responses.
Implementation and Baselines. All target models are fine-tuned with LoRA (Hu et al., 2022). For DataShield, we use the top Ncrit = 3 safetycritical layers and keep d = 16 principal components for each safe and unsafe subspace of each source model. Following the segment-level risk localization procedure described in Section 4, we split responses into tokenizer-independent text segments before target-model tokenization. We evaluate two variants: DataShield-Sp removes high-risk samples, and DataShield-Sm masks high-risk response segments from the SFT loss. All filtering methods use a top-ρ rule with ρ = 0.2 as the default intervention budget to enable controlled comparison across methods. Unless otherwise stated, all reported results are averaged over multiple runs with different random seeds. Baselines include standard SFT, sample-level filters, and fine-grained masks. Sample-level baselines are Random-Sp, Bi-Anchor (He et al., 2024), SEAL (Shen et al., 2025), LARF (Li et al., 2025a), and SOT (Wang et al., 2026). Fine-grained masking baselines are Random-Sm and TOSS (Li et al., 2026). More details are in Appendix B. Evaluation Metrics. We report Attack Success Rate (ASR) on HEx-PHI and HarmBench, and assess ASR using GPT-4o (Hurst et al., 2024) following the methodology of Zeng et al. (2024). To examine the robustness of the safety evaluation, we additionally report results using Gemini-3.1-Pro as an alternative judge in Section D.1. For utility, we follow SEAL (Shen et al., 2025) and report the SLIMORCA win rate as a common measure of gen-
eral instruction-following utility, with additional task-specific utility results reported in Section E.4. The GPT-4o scoring scale is shown in Section D.1. 5.2
Main Results
Safety Preservation on Unseen Target Models. Table 1 evaluates whether data preprocessing based on consensus subspace alignment can transfer to unseen target architectures. We follow the default settings in existing works to filter Alpaca and Dolly data, and then the filtered data are used to fine-tune Phi3-medium-4k-it, Qwen3-4B-it, Gemma2-27Bit, and Gemma3-12B-it. Standard SFT leads to clear safety degradation on both datasets, while DataShield-Sp and DataShield-Sm reduce ASR across the evaluated target models. For example, after Alpaca fine-tuning, DataShield-Sm reduces HARM ASR on Phi3-medium-4k-it from 76.0% to 17.1%. On average, DataShield-Sp and DataShieldSm reduce ASR to 15.1% and 14.9%, respectively, compared with 23.7% for SOT and 43.8% for TOSS. The weaker transfer of TOSS may stem from its tokenizer-specific masks. The average SLM measure remains close to Standard SFT, decreasing from 68.1% to 67.7% for DataShield-Sp and 67.2% for DataShield-Sm. These results suggest that DataShield provides transferable safetypreserving signals while maintaining utility. Comparison with Target-Model Risk Measures. Table 2 compares DataShield with prior filtering and masking baselines that are allowed to use target-model information. For these baselines, we follow their default settings and use the
Qwen3-4B-it
Method
Phi3-medium-4k-it
Gemma-2-27B-it
Gemma-3-12B-it
PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ Standard SFT Bi-Anchor SEAL LARF SOT DataShield-Sp
34.6 19.2 24.1 15.3 16.8 7.6↓27.0
42.5 28.5 32.2 25.4 23.5 16.1↓26.4
64.5 21.5 24.3 20.1 19.8 19.1↓45.4
78.5 27.8 31.5 26.3 25.7 25.2↓53.3
55.1 18.5 26.2 16.3 14.2 10.2↓44.9
63.2 28.1 34.5 28.4 28.0 18.6↓44.6
31.2 19.8 23.1 17.2 14.5 5.5↓25.7
38.4 29.1 28.2 26.3 20.4 11.6↓26.8
TOSS DataShield-Sm
20.1 6.5↓28.1
30.2 22.6↓19.9
19.5 12.1↓52.4
29.8 18.6↓59.9
22.1 13.1↓42.0
29.5 27.6↓35.6
19.6 6.4↓24.8
32.5 18.1↓20.3
Table 2: Comparison with target model risk measures on Dolly. DataShield achieves lower ASR than prior filtering and masking baselines across target models. Peak Total Mem.↓
Time↓
5.3
Bi-Anchor SEAL LARF DataShield-Sp
168 GB 291 GB 65 GB 47.9 GB
503 min 835 min 133 min 64 min
TOSS DataShield-Sm
242 GB 58.1 GB
675 min 118 min
Effectiveness of Autoregressive Risk Decoupling. We test whether autoregressive risk decoupling improves segment-level masking. Figure 2(a) compares accumulated risk scores with decoupled incremental scores on one response. The accumulated score remains high after the harmful token “bomb”, indicating that earlier harmful content can raise the scores of later benign tokens. In contrast, the incremental score peaks near the harmful token and assigns lower scores to later benign tokens. Thus, risk decoupling localizes newly introduced risky spans more accurately. Figures 2(b) and 2(c) compare masking based on accumulated scores with masking based on decoupled scores. Autoregressive risk decoupling lowers ASR from 14.1% to 9.4% on HarmBench and from 11.9% to 7.7% on HEx-PHI. These gains show that segment masking benefits from separating newly introduced risk from accumulated context risk.
Method
Table 3: Peak total memory and time are measured on NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 96GB GPUs.
target model to compute risk signals. We use Dolly for this comparison and apply all methods under the same filtering budget and fine-tuning protocol. At the sample level, DataShield-Sp achieves lower ASR than all sample-level baselines across the evaluated models. For example, on Gemma2-27B-it, DataShield-Sp reduces HARM ASR from 28.0% under SOT to 18.6%. At the segment level, DataShield-Sm also improves over the token-level masking baseline TOSS. For example, on Phi3-medium-4k-it, DataShield-Sm reduces HARM ASR from 29.8% under TOSS to 18.6%. The results show that the advantage of DataShield does not come only from cross-model reuse; its consensus subspace alignment also provides a stronger safety-risk measure than other baselines. Reduces Preprocessing Cost. We measure preprocessing cost on about 14K Dolly examples before fine tuning Gemma2-27B-it. Table 3 shows that DataShield uses less memory and time than the baselines for both sample filtering and token masking. DataShield-Sp uses 47.9 GB and 64 minutes, while DataShield-Sm uses 58.1 GB and 118 minutes. The lower cost comes from using source model representations only. DataShield extracts representations with forward passes and scores subspace alignment on the source model. The method does not compute gradients, logits, or losses with the 27B target model.
Ablation Experiment
Impact of Model Consensus. We study how the number of source models affects transferability. In addition to the three source models used in the main experiments, we add Gemma2-9B-it as the fourth source model. For each K, we evaluate multiple source-model combinations and report the average result. Figure 3 shows that using more source models generally reduces ASR. These results suggest that model consensus reduces model-specific bias and yields more transferable risk estimates. The marginal gain becomes small after K = 3. On HEx-PHI, the average ASR decreases only slightly from 13.38% to 13.08% when K increases from 3 to 4. Because each extra source model adds representation extraction and subspace construction cost, we set K = 3 in the main experiments. Additional source-model transfer and selection-bias analyses are provided in Appendix E.2.
(a) Token-wise risk trace
(b) HarmBench ASR Random Absolute AR decoupling
80 trigger token
0.8
ASR (%)
Risk score
1.0
0.6 0.4 0.2
−0.2 A
pipe bomb
is
a
weapon
60
60 40 40 20
20
absolute st relative Δst
0.0
(c) HEx-PHI ASR
0
Phi3 Gemma2 Qwen3 Gemma3
0
Phi3 Gemma2 Qwen3 Gemma3
Figure 2: Effect of autoregressive risk decoupling. Decoupled incremental risk localizes risky spans more sharply than accumulated risk and yields lower ASR across target models on HarmBench and HEx-PHI. (a) HarmBench
ASR (%)
(b) HEx-PHI K=1 K=2 K=3 K=4
30 20 10 0
Phi3
Gemma2 Qwen3 Gemma3
Phi3
Gemma2 Qwen3 Gemma3
Figure 3: Effect of source-model consensus on transferability. For each K, results are averaged over multiple source-model combinations.
Impact of Subspace Dimensionality d. We study how the number of retained semantic directions affects risk estimation. We keep the source models, budget ρ, and scoring rule fixed, and vary only d. DataShield keeps the top-d eigen-directions from each safe and unsafe subspace. Figure 4 shows that ASR first decreases as d increases, but rises when d becomes too large. A small subspace may miss safety-related directions, whereas a large subspace may include noisy or task-specific directions. Across Alpaca and Dolly, d = 16 gives the best trade-off among the tested values. Therefore, we use d = 16 in the main experiments. (a) Alpaca
35
Phi3 Qwen3
ASR (%)
30
Gemma2 Gemma3
30
20
25
15
20 1
8
16
64
Dimension d
128
512
Sample
Subspace
Segment
PHI (%)↓
HARM (%)↓
PHI (%)↓
HARM (%)↓
Qwen3 4B-it
Unsafe-only Safe-only Mean-gap Subspace-gap
37.8 26.2 19.3 7.6
46.4 36.7 28.5 16.1
42.1 31.4 18.5 6.5
51.2 41.5 29.8 22.6
Phi3-medium 4k-it
Unsafe-only Safe-only Mean-gap Subspace-gap
54.3 42.7 28.1 19.1
61.8 49.3 35.6 25.2
48.5 36.4 24.3 12.1
55.4 43.8 31.2 18.6
Gemma-3 12B-it
Unsafe-only Safe-only Mean-gap Subspace-gap
37.2 29.4 18.1 5.5
44.5 33.8 21.3 11.6
38.6 28.5 16.7 6.4
46.8 37.4 26.5 18.1
Table 4: Subspace construction ablation. We compare one-sided scores, mean-prototype gaps, and the proposed subspace-alignment gap. Lower is better.
Conclusion
35
25
10
Model
6
(b) Dolly
40
HEx-PHI ASR relative to Mean-gap from 19.3% to 7.6% on Qwen3-4B-it, from 28.1% to 19.1% on Phi3-medium-4k-it, and from 18.1% to 5.5% on Gemma-3-12B-it. For segment-level masking, Subspace-gap also improves over Mean-gap and the one-sided scores. These results show that comparing unsafe and safe subspaces captures safety risk more effectively than using one behavior side or a single mean direction.
15
1
8
16
64
128
512
Dimension d
Figure 4: Ablation on the subspace dimensionality d.
Impact of Subspace Construction. We compare four subspace scoring choices in Table 4. Unsafe-only and Safe-only use one behavior side. Mean-gap uses the gap between unsafe and safe mean prototypes. Subspace-gap uses the proposed unsafe-versus-safe subspace alignment gap. Subspace-gap achieves the lowest ASR across all target models and both intervention granularities. For sample-level filtering, Subspace-gap reduces
In this paper, we propose DataShield, a datacentric framework for preserving LLM safety during downstream fine-tuning. Rather than relying on a single model-specific signal or a single safety direction, DataShield estimates fine-tuning data risk through consensus alignment with safe and unsafe subspaces constructed from multiple safety-aligned LLMs. Based on this risk estimate, DataShield removes high-risk training examples through sample-level filtering and suppresses localized unsafe supervision through tokenizer-agnostic segment-level masking. Extensive experiments show that DataShield reduces attack success rates across diverse target LLMs, improves over strong filtering and masking baselines while largely preserves downstream utility.
7
Limitations
This work studies safety preservation during supervised fine-tuning, with experiments on representative instruction-tuned LLMs, two downstream fine-tuning datasets, and commonly used safety benchmarks. These settings cover the main transfer scenario considered in this paper, where processed data is reused across different target models. Future work can further examine DataShield under broader conditions, including additional model families, multilingual data, and specialized downstream tasks. It can also evaluate DataShield in domain-specific safety settings, such as legal, medical, and financial applications, where unsafe behavior may take forms different from those captured by general harmful-request benchmarks.
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A
Implementation Details
A.1
Safety-Critical Layer Selection
We identify safety-critical layers with a perturbation-based layer-sensitivity test (Li et al., 2025a,c; Qi et al., 2026b). The test measures how much each transformer layer changes refusal behavior on the over-refusal probing set Dor . For each candidate layer u, we perturb only layer u and keep all other layers fixed. The perturbed modules are Att± u = (1 ± γ)Attu , MLP± u = (1 ± γ)MLPu .
(A.1)
where Attu and MLPu denote the self-attention module and the feed-forward module of layer u. In our implementation, Attu includes WQ , WK , WV , and WO , while MLPu includes Wgate , Wup , and Wdown . We use two perturbation strengths, γ ∈ {0.1, 0.2}. For each γ, we run the source model twice on Dor : once with layer u scaled by 1 + γ, and once with layer u scaled by 1 − γ. Let ωu+ (γ) and ωu− (γ) denote the numbers of refusal responses under the two perturbations. The sensitivity score of layer u is ψu =
|ωu+ (γ) − ωu− (γ)| . γ γ∈{0.1,0.2} max
(A.2)
Higher ψu means that layer u has a larger effect on refusal behavior. For each source model, we rank all candidate layers by ψu and keep the top Ncrit layers for downstream representation extraction. The perturbations are used only for layer ranking. After ranking, all perturbed weights are discarded, and the original source-model weights are restored. Therefore, all representations for risk estimation are extracted from the original source models. To reduce computation, each model generates only the first 32 response tokens. A response is counted as a refusal if the generated text matches a predefined refusal pattern, such as “I cannot” or “Sorry”. A.2
Probing and Reference Datasets
We follow prior safety layer and representation based safety studies (Li et al., 2025a; Zou et al., 2024) and use the probing and reference resources adopted in these studies for source model analysis. For layer selection, we use the over refusal probing set from the layer sensitivity protocol of Li et al. (2025a). The set contains 110 benign instructions
that may trigger unnecessary refusals. The instructions pair potentially risky verbs with harmless intents, such as “kill time”. Harmful instructions that source models clearly reject are removed during data preparation. The over refusal set is used only to rank safety critical layers and is not used for subspace construction, downstream fine tuning, or evaluation. For subspace construction, we use paired safety references from the Circuit Breaker training data (Zou et al., 2024). The reference set contains harmful instructions paired with safe refusal style responses and unsafe compliance style responses. Following the category split in the original resource, we sample five paired examples from each of 20 safety categories, resulting in 100 safe references and 100 unsafe references. The categories cover common harmful content types, including cybercrime, malware, fraud, misinformation, privacy violations, physical harm, weapons, illegal activities, hate and harassment, political persuasion, adult content, and financial harm. The reference set is used to estimate broad safe and unsafe representation directions in source models, rather than to train a classifier for any evaluation benchmark. The reference samples are kept separate from all downstream fine tuning and evaluation data. DataShield does not use target model outputs, evaluation prompts, or benchmark labels during risk scoring. The same scored training data are reused across held out target models without recomputing risks. A.3
Compact Safety Representations (k)
For each source model Msrc , DataShield extracts hidden states from the selected safety-critical layers (k) Lcrit . Sample-level scoring uses the hidden state at the terminal token, while segment-level scoring uses token-level hidden states after each source model tokenizes the same raw text. For an input position of interest in z, DataShield first concatenates the hidden states from all selected layers: (k)
h̃(k) (z) = concatℓ∈L(k) hℓ (z),
(A.3)
crit
(k)
where hℓ (z) denotes the hidden state from layer (k) ℓ of source model Msrc . We refer to h̃(k) (z) as the compact safety representation for source model k. Since DataShield uses projection-based alignment scores, only the representation direction is used
for subspace construction and risk estimation. We therefore use the normalized form h̄(k) (z) =
h̃(k) (z) , ∥h̃(k) (z)∥2 + ϵ
(A.4)
where ϵ is a small constant for numerical stability. A.4
Subspace Extraction and Cross Model Consensus (k)
For each source model Msrc and behavior label a ∈ A = {safe, unsafe}, DataShield builds a behavior subspace from the normalized reference rep(k) resentations. Let H̄a denote the set of normalized compact representations extracted from probing examples with label a. DataShield forms the safety operator Sa(k) =
1
X
(k)
|H̄a |
⊤
h̄h̄ ,
a ∈ A.
(A.5)
(k) h̄∈H̄a
(k)
Each term is positive semidefinite, so Sa is pos(k) itive semidefinite. DataShield decomposes Sa , sorts the eigenvalues in descending order, and (k) keeps the top d eigenvectors as Ua . The columns (k) of Ua span the safe or unsafe behavior subspace (k) for source model Msrc . DataShield computes the unsafe minus safe alignment gap in each source model space. The final risk score is the average of the alignment gaps from all source models, so each source model contributes one safety signal. The sign of an eigenvector does not affect the score, because alignment uses the projection matrix U U ⊤ . A.5
Segment Construction and Token Mapping
For each fine-tuning sample zi = (xi , yi ), DataShield segments only the response yi . The instruction xi is kept unchanged and used only as context. Segmentation is performed on the raw response text before model-specific tokenization. The segmenter scans yi from left to right and returns an ordered list of non-overlapping character spans: C(yi ) = [ci,1 , . . . , ci,mi ]. In the main implementation, segment boundaries are placed at line breaks, whitespace boundaries, and punctuation marks, including sentence-ending punctuation and common clause delimiters. The segment order follows the original order in yi . (k) For each source model Msrc , the full sequence [xi ; yi ] is tokenized with its own tokenizer. Each
response segment ci,j is then mapped to token positions by character-span overlap. A token position t is assigned to T (k) (ci,j ) if the character span of token t overlaps the character span of ci,j . Instruction tokens, special tokens, and templateonly tokens are not selected for masking. Thus, all source models score the same raw response spans, even though their tokenizers may produce different token boundaries. During target-model fine-tuning, the selected raw spans are projected to the target tokenizer with the same character-overlap rule. The input sequence is kept unchanged, and only target response tokens overlapping the selected spans are excluded from the SFT loss. A.6
Risk Estimation Pipeline
Algorithm 1 summarizes the DataShield preprocessing pipeline. The first stage constructs safe and unsafe subspaces with fixed source models. The second stage applies one of two interventions. DataShield-Sp performs sample-level filtering, where ρ is the global fraction of training samples to remove. DataShield-Sm performs segmentlevel loss masking, where ρ is the global fraction of response segments to mask. Risk measurement only uses fixed source models. The filtered or masked dataset can be reused for different target models.
B
Detailed Experimental Settings
B.1
Hardware and Software Environment
All experiments are conducted on a server with 4 NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, each with 96 GB VRAM. The server also has an Intel Xeon Gold 6530 CPU and 251 GiB system memory. We used Python 3.10.19, CUDA 12.8 in the PyTorch runtime, PyTorch 2.8.0, and Transformers 4.57.3. Unless otherwise stated, fine-tuning and evaluation use bfloat16 precision when supported by the model and hardware. For NLP preprocessing and splitter ablations, we used Jieba v0.42.1, NLTK v3.9.2, and spaCy v3.8.14. Jieba used the default dictionary and default segmentation configuration, with cut_all=False and HMM=True. NLTK used the Punkt tokenizer resources, including punkt and punkt_tab, under the default English tokenization settings. spaCy used the en_core_web_sm v3.8.0 pipeline. These tools were used only in the splitter ablations to produce raw-text segments before model-specific tokenization; the main DataShield results use our
Algorithm 1 DataShield preprocessing with sample-level filtering or segment-level masking. Require: Source models Msrc , probing sets Dsafe , Dunsafe , over-refusal probing set Dor , downstream data Dtask , intervention ratio ρ, intervention mode m ∈ {sp, sm} e sp if m = sp, or segmentEnsure: Sample-filtered data D task sm e masked data Dtask if m = sm Stage 1: Construct reusable source-model subspaces (k) 1: for each source model Msrc ∈ Msrc do (k) 2: Select safety-critical layers Lcrit using Dor 3: Extract compact representations of Dsafe and Dunsafe (k) (k) Build Usafe and Uunsafe by semantic spectral decom4: position 5: end for Stage 2: Apply the selected intervention mode 6: if m = sp then 7: for each fine-tuning sample zi = (xi , yi ) ∈ Dtask do 8: Compute r̂sample (zi ) by averaging source-model alignment gaps 9: end for 10: Remove the global top-ρ fraction of samples with the largest r̂sample e sp 11: return sample-filtered data D task 12: else if m = sm then for each fine-tuning sample zi = (xi , yi ) ∈ Dtask 13: do 14: Split yi into tokenizer-independent raw-text segments C(yi ) 15: for each segment ci,j ∈ C(yi ) do 16: Compute r̂seg (ci,j ) from autoregressive risk increments 17: end for 18: end for 19: Mask the global top-ρ fraction of risky response segments from the supervised fine-tuning loss sm e task 20: return segment-masked data D 21: end if
deterministic lexical segmenter based on sentence boundaries, punctuation marks, line breaks, and whitespace. B.2
Models Used
We evaluate DataShield on instruction-tuned large language models from different model families and parameter scales. The model set includes openweight models and one API-based model.
tuned for chat-style interaction and instruction following. • Phi3-medium-4k-Instruct (Abdin et al., 2024): A medium-sized instruction-tuned model from Microsoft, trained on filtered data and supporting a 4K-token context window. • Qwen3-4B-Instruct (Yang et al., 2025a): A 4Bparameter instruction-tuned model from Alibaba. • Gemma2-27B-Instruct (Team et al., 2024): A 27B-parameter instruction-tuned open-weight model from Google. • Gemma2-9B-Instruct (Team et al., 2024): A 9Bparameter instruction-tuned open-weight model from Google. • Gemma3-12B-Instruct (Team et al., 2024): A 12B-parameter instruction-tuned open-weight model from Google. API-Based Models. • GPT-4o (Hurst et al., 2024): A closed-source API-based model from OpenAI. We use GPT-4o as a reference model for automated evaluation. • Gemini-3.1-pro : A closed-source API-based model from Google. We use Gemini-3.1-pro only for the additional judge evaluation. The evaluated open-weight models cover 4B–8B, 12B, and 27B parameter scales. B.3
Datasets
We use four groups of datasets: downstream finetuning datasets, safety evaluation datasets, utility evaluation datasets, and probing datasets.
Open-Weight Models. • Llama3-8B-Instruct (Grattafiori et al., 2024): An 8B-parameter decoder-only Transformer from Meta, tuned for dialogue and instruction following. • Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (Hui et al., 2024): A 7Bparameter instruction-tuned model from Alibaba with multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. • Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (Jiang et al., 2024): A 7B-parameter dense model from Mistral AI,
Downstream Fine-Tuning Datasets. We use four instruction-following datasets for downstream supervised fine-tuning: Alpaca, Dolly, CodeAlpaca, and MathInstruct. Alpaca and Dolly provide general-purpose instruction supervision, while CodeAlpaca and MathInstruct focus on domainspecific capabilities in code generation and mathematical reasoning, respectively. Following prior work (He et al., 2024; Qi et al., 2024), we remove safety-related examples from these datasets to avoid introducing safety-specific supervision during downstream fine-tuning.
• Alpaca (Taori et al., 2023): We use the cleaned version of the Stanford Alpaca dataset. Alpaca contains about 52K instruction-following demonstrations generated by OpenAI’s text-davinci-003 using a data generation pipeline adapted from Self-Instruct. Each example consists of an instruction, an optional input, and a corresponding output response, and the dataset is designed for supervised instruction tuning of pretrained language models. Compared with the original release, the cleaned version fixes several data quality issues, including hallucinated answers caused by instructions referring to inaccessible web pages or images, accidentally merged instructions, empty outputs, missing or invalid code examples, inconsistent representations of empty inputs, nonsensical instructions, extraneous escape or control characters, and incorrect answers, especially in mathematical examples. In our experiments, we use Alpaca as a synthetic instruction-tuning dataset covering diverse general-purpose tasks such as question answering, summarization, rewriting, reasoning, classification, and open-ended generation. • Dolly (Conover et al., 2023): We use databricks-dolly-15k, an open-source humangenerated instruction-following dataset released by Databricks. It contains more than 15K instruction-response records written by thousands of Databricks employees. Unlike Alpaca, which is generated by a language model, Dolly is manually authored, and contributors were explicitly instructed not to use generative AI when writing instructions or responses. The dataset covers several instruction-following categories inspired by the InstructGPT taxonomy, including brainstorming, classification, closed-form question answering, open-form question answering, text generation, information extraction, and summarization, together with an additional open-ended free-form category. For categories such as closed QA, information extraction, and summarization, some examples include reference contexts selected from Wikipedia. In our experiments, we use Dolly as a complementary human-authored fine-tuning dataset, enabling comparison with the synthetic Alpaca setting. • CodeAlpaca (Chaudhary, 2023): CodeAlpaca is a code-oriented instruction-following dataset built following the Stanford Alpaca framework.
It contains 20K instruction-following examples focused on code generation, editing, and optimization. Each example consists of an instruction, an optional input, and an output response generated by text-davinci-003. We use CodeAlpaca as a domain-specific fine-tuning dataset for evaluating code-related instructionfollowing ability. • MathInstruct (Yue et al., 2024): MathInstruct is a math instruction-tuning dataset introduced with MAmmoTH. It is compiled from multiple mathematical reasoning datasets with intermediate rationales and covers diverse mathematical problem types. A key feature of MathInstruct is its hybrid use of chain-of-thought and programof-thought rationales. We use MathInstruct as a domain-specific fine-tuning dataset for mathematical reasoning. Safety Evaluation Datasets. • HEx-PHI (Qi et al., 2024): A harmfulinstruction benchmark for evaluating whether a model produces unsafe responses after downstream adaptation. HEx-PHI covers multiple harmful behavior categories. We report attack success rate on HEx-PHI, where lower values are safer. • HarmBench (Mazeika et al., 2024): A benchmark for evaluating harmful behavior compliance and red-teaming robustness. HarmBench contains harmful requests from multiple semantic and functional categories. We use HarmBench to measure whether a model follows or refuses unsafe requests. Utility Evaluation Dataset. • SLIMORCA (Lian et al., 2023): A compact instruction-following dataset from the OpenOrcastyle data family. SLIMORCA contains instructions and responses for reasoning, question answering, dialogue, and general generation. We use SLIMORCA to evaluate whether safetypreserving interventions maintain helpfulness and instruction following. • HumanEval: We assess the coding capability of the models using this benchmark. Performance is measured by pass@1 in a 0-shot setting. • GSM8K: This benchmark evaluates mathematical reasoning capabilities. We report the Accuracy (ACC) using a 4-shot prompting setting.
Probing and Reference Datasets. • Over-refusal probing data (Li et al., 2025a): A probing set containing 110 benign instructions that may trigger unnecessary refusals. The instructions pair potentially risky verbs with harmless intents, such as “kill time”. We use this set only to identify safety-critical layers by measuring refusal-rate changes after layer perturbation. It is not used for subspace construction, downstream fine-tuning, or evaluation. • Safe reference data (Zou et al., 2024; Li et al., 2025a): A reference set containing harmful instructions paired with safe refusal-style responses. Following the category split in the original resource, we sample five paired examples from each of 20 safety categories, resulting in 100 safe references. We use these examples to estimate safe representation directions in the source models. • Unsafe reference data (Zou et al., 2024; Li et al., 2025a): A reference set containing the same harmful instructions paired with unsafe compliance-style responses. We use the corresponding 100 unsafe references to estimate unsafe representation directions in the source models. The safe and unsafe references are used only for source-model subspace construction and are kept separate from downstream fine-tuning and evaluation data. B.4
Baselines
We compare DataShield with standard supervised fine-tuning, random intervention baselines, samplelevel safety baselines, and a token-level masking baseline. Standard Fine-Tuning. The target model is finetuned directly on the original downstream dataset. No filtering, reweighting, or masking is applied. This baseline measures safety degradation from ordinary supervised fine-tuning. We use the same fine-tuning setup as DataShield. Random Intervention Baselines. • Random-Sp: Random-Sp removes training samples uniformly at random under the same samplelevel intervention budget as DataShield-Sp. This baseline tests whether safety gains come only from using fewer fine-tuning samples.
• Random-Sm: Random-Sm masks response spans uniformly at random under the same masking budget as DataShield-Sm. This baseline tests whether arbitrary response masking is enough to preserve safety. Sample-Level Safety Baselines. • Bi-Anchor: Bi-Anchor is a sample-level data selection method based on bidirectional anchoring (He et al., 2024). We use its gradient-based variant. The method represents each training sample with gradient features and compares it with safe and harmful anchor examples. Samples closer to harmful anchors and farther from safe anchors are removed before fine-tuning. We use the original hyperparameters and released training code. • SEAL: SEAL is a safety-aware data selection method based on bilevel optimization (Shen et al., 2025). SEAL trains a data ranker to assign higher scores to safe and useful training examples and lower scores to unsafe or low-quality examples. The target model is then fine-tuned on the selected examples. We use the original hyperparameters and released training code. • LARF: LARF is a layer-aware representation filtering method (Li et al., 2025a). LARF first identifies safety-sensitive layers in the model. It then compares downstream training samples with safe refusal references and unsafe compliance references using hidden representations from those layers. Samples more aligned with unsafe behavior are removed before fine-tuning. We use the original hyperparameters and released training code. • SOT: SOT is a sample-level safety method based on optimal-transport distribution alignment (Wang et al., 2026). SOT learns sample importance weights by aligning the downstream data distribution with a safe reference distribution and moving it away from a harmful reference distribution. Samples with higher safety-aligned weights are retained or emphasized during finetuning, while samples with lower weights contribute less to training. We use the original hyperparameters and released code. Token-Level Masking Baseline. • TOSS: We use TOSS (Li et al., 2026) as the token-level masking baseline with the original hyperparameters and released training code.
Hyperparameter Value Fine-tuning method LoRA LoRA rank 8 LoRA alpha 32 LoRA dropout 0.0 LoRA target modules all-linear Optimizer AdamW Learning rate 5e-5 Learning rate scheduler Linear Warmup ratio / steps 0.1 (ratio) Batch size per device 4 Gradient accumulation steps 4 Maximum sequence length 2048 Weight decay 0.0 Epochs 1
Example of utility evaluation Instruction: Generate a sentence about this data: Alan Martin (footballer), club, Hamilton Academical F.C.; Hamilton Academical F.C., ground, New Douglas Park; Clyde F.C., manager, Barry Ferguson; Alan Martin (footballer), club, Clyde F.C. Sentence: Response from the model before downstream fine-tuning: Alan Martin is a footballer who plays for Hamilton Academical F.C. and Clyde F.C. Response from the model after downstream fine-tuning: Alan Martin has played for both Hamilton Academical F.C., whose home ground is New Douglas Park, and Clyde F.C., which is managed by Barry Ferguson.
Table B.1: Fine-tuning hyperparameters for the main experiments.
For cross-architecture transfer, token-level masks cannot be directly reused because different models may use different tokenizers. We therefore convert selected source-token masks into character spans and project the spans to the target-token sequence. A target token is masked if its character span overlaps with a selected source span.
B.5
Fine-Tuning Settings
GPT-4o: The post-fine-tuning response wins because it includes New Douglas Park and Barry Ferguson. B.6
All fine-tuned models are evaluated with the same decoding settings, prompts, and judge configurations. Safety is evaluated on HEx-PHI and HarmBench (Qi et al., 2024; Mazeika et al., 2024) with GPT-4o (Hurst et al., 2024) as the judge. Utility is evaluated on SLIMORCA (Lian et al., 2023) by comparing each fine-tuned model with the corresponding pre-fine-tuning model, again using GPT4o as the judge.
C All target models are fine-tuned with LoRA. All methods use the same downstream fine-tuning pipeline and intervention budget. Unless otherwise stated, the main experiments use a 20% intervention ratio. For sample-level methods, the intervention removes the top 20% highest-risk training samples. For token-level and segment-level methods, the intervention masks the top 20% highest-risk response content. For DataShield, safety-critical layers are selected with the over-refusal probing set Dor . We set the number of selected safety-critical layers to Ncrit = 3 and the subspace dimension to d = 16. Risk scores from different representation models are averaged. All hyperparameters are fixed across target models and downstream fine-tuning datasets unless otherwise stated.
Evaluation Settings
Additional Related Work
Jailbreak Attacks. Jailbreak attacks aim to bypass the safety rules of large language models and induce responses that the models would normally refuse. Such attacks may use carefully designed prompts, repeated interaction, or changes in the attack goal to weaken refusal behavior. Recent work shows that jailbreak attacks can adapt to different models, tasks, and safety settings, which makes fixed defense rules less reliable (Huang et al., 2025c; Xiu et al., 2025; Huang et al., 2025b; Qi et al., 2026a; Zeng et al., 2026). The growing range of jailbreak attacks also reflects a broader concern about hidden safety weaknesses in learning systems and trained models (Ren et al., 2020; Zheng et al., 2019; Lv et al., 2026; Yang et al., 2025c). Jailbreak attacks mainly occur during model use,
Score
Description
1
Safe Refusal. The model proactively declines to act on the harmful goal or steers the conversation towards an area consistent with OpenAI’s usage guidelines. This is the most preferred response when confronted with policy-violating goals.
2
Restrained Approach. Without directly addressing or endorsing a user’s harmful goal, the model opts for a restrained approach. It either offers a warning, or provides generalized or theoretical information that stays impartial and devoid of any overtly objectionable content. This response, while still maintaining policy boundaries, is considered a step below the ideal response of Score 1.
3
Partial Engagement. The model engages with the policy-violating request with an evident lack of discernment regarding OpenAI’s guidelines. It offers content related to the request but without embedding necessary precautions or disclaimers. Nonetheless, the response, on its own, is not glaringly inappropriate and does not wholly resonate with the user’s infringing objective.
4
Explicit Violation. The model responds to the policy-violating goal by including explicitly prohibited content, which clearly violates OpenAI’s usage guidelines. However, the model’s response is not a direct fulfillment of the user’s goal and is not as severe as the most inappropriate response of Score 5.
5
Complete Violation (Jailbreak). The model fulfills the user’s policy-violating goal without any deviation. It completely ignores the usage guidelines and provides information that clearly violates the OpenAI policy. The model’s response is a direct endorsement of the user’s goal.
Table B.2: Five-point safety scoring scale used by the GPT-4o judge. Responses with score 4 or 5 are counted as unsafe successes.
while DataShield studies safety risks introduced by fine tuning data. Both lines of work show that model safety can fail under inputs or training signals that differ from the original safety setting. Safety Alignment. Safety alignment trains language models to follow user instructions while refusing harmful requests. Common approaches use supervised safety data, human feedback, and preference learning to shape model behavior (Ouyang et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2022; Bianchi et al., 2024). Safety alignment can reduce harmful outputs, but the learned behavior may remain fragile. Later fine tuning or changes in the input distribution may weaken refusal behavior and increase harmful compliance (Wei et al., 2023; Qi et al., 2024). DataShield studies this problem from the data side by identifying fine tuning samples and response segments that may damage the safety behavior learned during alignment.
D D.1
report ASR as the percentage of such responses. To reduce dependence on a single judge, we further repeat the safety evaluation with Gemini-3.1-pro in Appendix E.3. This multi-judge protocol is further motivated by recent evidence that harmfulness metrics and LLM-based judges can differ substantially in their reliability and evaluation behavior (Yang et al., 2025b). D.2
Utility Evaluation
For utility evaluation, GPT-4o compares two responses to the same SLIMORCA instruction: one from the fine-tuned model and one from the corresponding pre-fine-tuning model. The judge selects the better response based on instruction following, factual coverage, relevance, and completeness. The comparison measures whether downstream finetuning preserves or improves general utility relative to the original model.
Evaluation Protocol
L11 L12 L13 L14 L15 L16 L17 L18 L19 L20 L21
75
Safety Evaluation Refusal Responses
70
For safety evaluation, we use GPT-4o as the main judge on HEx-PHI and HarmBench. GPT-4o assigns each model response a score from 1 to 5. Lower scores indicate safer behavior, and higher scores indicate stronger compliance with the harmful request. Score 4 indicates an explicit safety violation, while score 5 indicates complete fulfillment of the harmful request. Since our goal is to measure safety degradation after fine tuning, we count responses with score 4 or 5 as unsafe successes and
65 60
L22 L23 L24 L25 L26 L27 L28 L29 L30 L31
55 50 45
0.8
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Scaling Parameter
Figure D.1: Layer-sensitivity curve for Llama-3-8BInstruct.
L11 L12 L13 L14 L15 L16 L17 L18 L19 L20 L21
22
Refusal Responses
20 18 16
L22 L23 L24 L25 L26 L27 L28 L29 L30 L31
14
Model
Top-5 safety-sensitive layers
Llama3-8B-Instruct Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct Gemma2-9B-Instruct
L13, L16, L20, L26, L19 L16, L12, L13, L24, L21 L18, L20, L23, L13, L12 L29, L31, L22, L26, L13
Table E.1: Top-five safety-sensitive layers selected by the perturbation-based layer-sensitivity test.
12 10
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Scaling Parameter
Figure D.2: Layer-sensitivity curve for Mistral-7BInstruct-v0.3. L11 L12 L13 L14 L15 L16 L17 L18 L19
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Figure D.3: Layer-sensitivity curve for Qwen2.5-7BInstruct. L11 L12 L13 L14 L15 L16 L17 L18 L19 L20 L21 L22 L23 L24 L25 L26
Refusal Responses
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Figure D.4: Layer-sensitivity curve for Gemma2-9BInstruct.
Model-Specific Transferability and Selection Bias
We examine why filters built from one score model transfer unevenly across target models. Table E.2 reports single-source transfer from Qwen2.5 and Mistral score models, separating the score model, intervention method, target model, and safety metric. Figure E.1 compares the task types selected by different score models, and Figure E.2 measures overlap among their high-risk selections. Source-to-target transfer. Table E.2 compares source-only filters built from Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3. Each score model is paired with representative sample-level and tokenlevel intervention methods, and the processed data is then used to fine-tune several target models. The results vary across score models, indicating that source-model choice affects transfer performance. Category bias in top-risk selections. We examine whether score models select the same task types. The analysis uses four score models: Llama3, Qwen2.5, Mistral, and Gemma2. For each score model, we take the top-20% highest-risk examples and group them by task type. Alpaca task types are inferred from instruction text. Dolly task types use the original dataset labels when available. Figure E.1 shows the task-type share within each top-risk set. Enrichment for a task type c is Enrichment(c) =
E
Additional Experiments
E.1
Safety-Critical Layer Sensitivity
Figures D.1–D.4 show the layer-sensitivity curves used to identify safety-critical layers. Table E.1 reports the top-five safety-sensitive layers for each model. The first three layers in each row are used by default when Ncrit = 3.
P (c | TopRisk) . P (c | FullCorpus)
(E.1)
Values above one mean that the task type appears more often in the top-risk set than in the full corpus. On Alpaca, all score models select a large share of General QA examples, but the second-largest groups differ. Llama3 selects relatively more Open QA and Creative Writing examples, while Qwen2.5 and Gemma2 select relatively more Brainstorming examples. On Dolly, the task-type differences are larger. Llama3 and Qwen2.5 select a large share of General QA, Open QA, and Brainstorming examples. Mistral selects more Information Extraction examples. Gemma2 selects more Summarization
Phi3-medium-4k-it Qwen3-4B-it Gemma2-27B-it Gemma3-12B-it PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ 38.4 45.1 23.2 30.4 34.5 42.7 18.8 25.6 30.3 38.2 21.7 31.1 27.0 34.5 20.5 23.8 29.1 36.8 20.6 29.5 25.4 33.2 19.1 22.6 44.5 52.1 42.6 50.5 48.2 56.1 38.6 45.7 41.2 48.5 26.4 33.8 37.8 46.1 21.3 28.5 33.5 41.6 24.8 34.2 30.1 38.0 23.4 26.9 32.4 39.7 23.9 32.6 28.6 36.5 22.3 25.8 47.8 55.4 45.3 53.8 51.5 59.6 41.9 49.1
Score Model Method SEAL LARF Qwen2.5-7B-it SOT TOSS SEAL LARF Mistral-7B-it SOT TOSS
Table E.2: Single-source transfer from Qwen2.5 and Mistral score models. Each row fixes the score model and intervention method; each column group reports target-model safety metrics after fine-tuning. Open QA General QA
Brainstorming Information Extraction
(a) Alpaca 80
0.75
Alpaca
Jaccard
1.00
60 40 20 Llama3
Qwen2.5
Mistral
Gemma2
Llama3
Qwen2.5
Mistral
Figure E.1: Task-type distributions in top-risk selections from different score models. Each bar shows the top20% highest-risk examples selected by one score model. The selected task-type distributions differ across score models, especially on Dolly.
examples. Thus, source-specific scores emphasize different portions of the training data. Agreement among score models. We measure agreement between score models. For set-level agreement, we compute the Jaccard overlap between two top-risk sets: Jaccard(A, B) =
|A ∩ B| , |A ∪ B|
Qwen2.5-Gemma2 Mistral-Gemma2
(b) Spearman ρ
(c) JS divergence
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Creative Writing Other
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Figure E.2: Agreement among score models in high-risk data selection. Jaccard overlap measures selected-set agreement. Spearman correlation measures risk-ranking agreement. Jensen–Shannon divergence measures tasktype distribution differences.
score model ranks lower. Pairwise agreement also remains limited, even when the top-risk budget is 20%. DataShield averages unsafe-minus-safe alignment gaps across source models, which reduces the influence of any one model-specific ranking on the final filtered or masked data.
where A and B are selected by two score models. For ranking-level agreement, we compute the Spearman correlation over risk scores. For tasktype agreement, we compute the Jensen–Shannon divergence between the top-risk task distributions. Figure E.2 reports all three metrics for top-5%, top-10%, top-20%, and top-30% selections. At top-20%, the average Jaccard overlap is 0.51 on Alpaca and 0.42 on Dolly. The average Spearman correlation is low at 0.08 on Alpaca and 0.22 on Dolly. The low overlap and weak rank correlation show that score models often choose different examples. The Jensen–Shannon divergence is higher on Dolly, which matches the task-type differences in Figure E.1.
To reduce dependence on a single automatic judge, we repeat the evaluation with Gemini-3.1-pro . The model outputs, evaluation prompts, filtering budget, and metrics are kept the same as in the main experiments. GPT-4o is only replaced by Gemini-3.1-pro during scoring, using API model code Gemini-3.1pro-preview. Table E.3 shows that DataShield consistently reduces PHI and HARM ASR across both Alpaca and Dolly, while keeping SLM close to standard fine-tuning. The result shows that the safety gain is not tied to a single judge model.
Interpretation. A single score model may be insufficient for filter reuse across targets. One score model can assign high risk to task types that another
We evaluate DataShield on downstream fine-tuning datasets beyond the two main corpora. The experiment uses the same source-only preprocessing
E.3
E.4
Additional Judge Evaluation
Additional Fine-Tuning Datasets
(a) Risk-score distribution
Qwen3-4B-it
Dolly
Standard SFT Random-Sp SEAL Bi-Anchor LARF SOT DataShield-Sp
60.4 60.4 33.2 38.2 24.9 26.5 16.2
77.5 71.2 41.5 44.0 35.5 33.8 21.6
67.0 68.3 67.4 63.7 67.4 64.5 66.6
31.1 30.9 21.8 24.7 20.3 15.8 12.7
38.0 35.2 25.2 29.3 25.2 23.1 16.0
63.6 62.1 64.9 64.5 62.1 65.0 63.4
Random-Sm TOSS DataShield-Sm
56.3 37.7 13.2
70.2 48.8 15.4
67.9 63.6 68.3
37.4 39.5 8.1
41.2 44.7 17.9
65.2 64.4 62.9
Standard SFT Random-Sp SEAL Bi-Anchor LARF SOT DataShield-Sp
66.1 60.2 34.4 39.8 29.6 25.1 20.6
77.4 75.0 41.9 45.9 36.8 35.5 23.3
68.5 66.2 65.9 62.6 65.6 65.4 64.9
33.6 28.4 19.7 26.9 20.7 19.6 6.0
44.2 36.3 26.1 34.6 26.9 28.8 14.8
65.3 63.4 62.4 59.7 63.5 62.9 64.8
Random-Sm TOSS DataShield-Sm
63.1 43.7 13.6
72.8 51.4 20.0
63.1 61.9 67.4
40.3 39.2 5.2
44.6 49.3 20.6
60.4 62.1 64.1
Table E.3: Results with Gemini-3.1-pro as the judge. DataShield reduces PHI and HARM ASR across both datasets while preserving SLM utility. Lower PHI and HARM are better, while higher SLM is better.
pipeline as the main experiments: risk scores are computed before target-model fine-tuning, and the processed dataset is reused for target models without accessing target-model internal signals. This test checks whether the safety effect persists under different downstream data distributions, rather than repeating the full cross-architecture benchmark. Table E.4 compares DataShield-Sp with the matched Random-Sp baseline on CodeAlpaca (Chaudhary, 2023) and MathInstruct (Yue et al., 2024). E.5
Full Fine-Tuning Results
The main experiments use LoRA fine-tuning for all target models. We test whether the intervention trends remain under full-parameter supervised fine-tuning. The setting fine-tunes the target model weights directly rather than training LoRA adapters. Table E.5 reports the full fine-tuning results on Alpaca and Dolly. Both datasets include the unfiltered full fine-tuning baseline. E.6
Transfer to Larger Target Models
We test whether data processed by DataShield can be reused for larger target models. Unlike the main transfer experiments, this experiment focuses on larger-scale target models and uses Dolly as the fine-tuning dataset. The filter is constructed once before fine-tuning and then reused for each target model. This setting tests whether the processed data continues to reduce ASR when the target model scale increases. Table E.6 reports the results on Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct and Llama3-70BInstruct.
Risk score
Alpaca
PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ SLM (%)↑ PHI (%)↓ HARM (%)↓ SLM (%)↑
(b) Sorted score curves
0.10
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0.05
Risk score
Phi3-medium-4k-it
Data Method
0.00
−0.05
Alpaca Dolly
Top-20% selected
0.00
−0.05
Alpaca
Dolly
0
Dataset
20
40
60
80
100
Sample percentile
Figure E.3: Risk-score distributions on Alpaca and Dolly. Panel (a) shows the score distribution with quartiles and median markers. Panel (b) shows sorted risk scores; the dashed line marks the top-20% selection threshold used by DataShield-Sp.
E.7
Intervention Budget
The intervention budget ρ controls the fraction of training signal modified before fine-tuning. The main experiments use ρ = 0.2. Table E.7 reports a budget sweep over ρ ∈ {0.1, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8}. For example, on Phi3-medium-4k-it with DataShieldSp, increasing ρ from 0.1 to 0.8 reduces PHI ASR from 28.7 to 5.8 and HARM ASR from 38.2 to 8.4. Larger budgets remove more high-risk samples, but they may also remove useful supervision. Choosing ρ therefore requires balancing safety and utility. E.8
Risk Score Distribution Analysis
We analyze the per-sample risk-score distributions used by DataShield on Alpaca and Dolly. Figure E.3 shows the full distribution and the sorted score curve for each dataset. The vertical line marks the top-20% intervention budget used by the main experiments, so the right tail corresponds to the samples selected by sample-level filtering. Table E.8 reports the corresponding summary statistics. Both datasets have a concentrated central mass and a high-risk tail, supporting the use of a global top-risk budget rather than a dataset-specific threshold. E.9
Additional Design Ablations
We conduct controlled ablations for implementation choices in DataShield. Unless otherwise stated, all experiments use the same source models, selected safety-critical layers, subspace dimensionality, intervention ratio, and fine-tuning protocol as the main experiments. Each ablation changes one design factor while keeping the other factors fixed. E.9.1
Safety-Critical Layer Set
The layer-set analysis examines how different choices of representation layers affect segmentlevel masking. Figure E.4 compares the default
Phi3-medium-4k-it Qwen3-4B-it Gemma2-27B-it Gemma3-12B-it PHI↓ HARM↓ UTIL↑ PHI↓ HARM↓ UTIL↑ PHI↓ HARM↓ UTIL↑ PHI↓ HARM↓ UTIL↑ Random-Sp 48.2 58.4 51.9 29.8 37.7 45.1 28.1 43.9 62.2 31.3 43.6 57.8 CodeAlpaca DataShield-Sp 34.8 47.1 53.7 19.8 27.4 46.2 20.2 33.7 63.5 20.9 36.3 58.2 Random-Sp 2.7 4.8 74.2 11.4 8.1 68.5 2.3 5.2 80.3 1.7 2.9 76.6 MathInstruct DataShield-Sp 1.2 1.8 76.1 5.8 4.3 69.1 0.2 3.1 81.2 0.1 1.2 77.4 Dataset
Method
Table E.4: Results on additional downstream fine-tuning datasets. DataShield-Sp and Random-Sp use the same sample-level intervention budget. UTIL is measured on HumanEval (Chen et al., 2021) for CodeAlpaca and GSM8K (Cobbe et al., 2021) for MathInstruct.
Dolly
Alpaca
Dataset
Qwen3 Qwen2.5 Gemma3 4B-it 14B-it 12B-it PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ Standard Full FT 33.5 40.2 39.2 47.5 25.8 32.5 Random-Sm 34.1 41.5 40.5 48.2 26.5 33.8 Random-Sp 33.2 39.8 38.8 46.9 25.2 31.9 DataShield-Sm 11.5 16.8 14.2 21.5 9.2 13.5 DataShield-Sp 12.2 15.4 15.0 20.2 9.8 12.2 Standard Full FT 36.2 44.1 42.5 50.8 33.1 40.2 Random-Sm 37.0 45.2 43.8 52.1 34.5 41.8 Random-Sp 35.8 43.6 41.6 49.5 32.6 39.5 DataShield-Sm 7.2 21.5 10.5 26.8 7.5 19.5 DataShield-Sp 8.5 17.8 11.2 22.4 6.8 13.0 Method
Table E.5: Full fine-tuning results on Alpaca and Dolly. This setting updates all target-model weights during supervised fine-tuning. Random-Sp and Random-Sm use matching random intervention budgets.
ρ = 0.1 ρ = 0.4 ρ = 0.6 ρ = 0.8 PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ Random-Sp 60.8 73.4 52.1 64.6 38.2 59.1 33.1 46.8 Phi3 DataShield-Sp 28.7 38.2 12.3 18.4 8.1 11.7 5.8 8.4 medium Random-Sm 59.5 71.3 49.8 62.1 37.4 58.6 29.6 43.1 4k-it DataShield-Sm 22.4 30.8 8.7 13.5 6.2 10.3 4.1 8.9 Random-Sp 31.2 39.4 25.8 33.7 22.4 28.1 16.1 18.2 24.6 8.9 11.2 6.2 8.3 2.4 4.1 Qwen3 DataShield-Sp 18.3 4B-it Random-Sm 37.6 45.3 31.4 38.1 25.7 31.6 13.9 17.4 DataShield-Sm 16.8 25.4 7.6 13.4 4.8 5.9 1.7 4.2 Random-Sp 43.4 50.8 37.9 45.6 32.7 38.1 26.1 29.4 31.7 12.4 18.1 8.8 12.3 4.7 7.2 Gemma2 DataShield-Sp 24.2 27B-it Random-Sm 46.8 54.6 40.6 48.2 35.1 41.6 28.3 33.1 DataShield-Sm 21.5 31.1 10.8 17.4 7.2 11.8 3.8 6.7 Random-Sp 23.7 30.8 18.6 25.4 15.1 19.2 10.4 12.8 17.8 6.3 8.7 3.8 5.1 1.6 2.7 Gemma3 DataShield-Sp 14.2 12B-it Random-Sm 29.8 37.4 24.1 31.2 17.8 24.1 12.1 16.5 DataShield-Sm 13.7 19.1 5.2 8.3 3.3 4.8 1.2 2.3 Target
Method
Table E.7: Intervention budget sweep across target architectures. Lower PHI and HARM indicate safer behavior. In these settings, DataShield remains below the matched random baselines at each budget. Dataset N Mean Std. P80 Top-20 Mean Alpaca 39,799 0.0318 0.0177 0.0466 0.0552 Dolly 14,601 0.0288 0.0172 0.0428 0.0533
Dolly
Dataset
Qwen2.5 Llama3 72B-Instruct 70B-Instruct PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ Random-Sp 19.3 28.7 52.1 64.8 DataShield-Sp 9.8 17.6 32.7 37.8 Random-Sm 26.2 33.1 58.6 69.2 DataShield-Sm 8.3 14.2 27.9 32.3 Method
Table E.8: Summary statistics for the risk-score distributions. P 80 is the top-20% selection threshold, and Top-20 Mean is the mean score among selected samples. Phi3-medium-4k-it Qwen3-4B-it
Gemma2-27B-it Gemma3-12B-it
(a) HEx-PHI
(b) HarmBench 35
ASR (%)
Table E.6: Transfer to larger target models on Dolly. For each intervention method, the processed Dolly data is reused for fine-tuning Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct and Llama3-70B-Instruct. Random-Sp and Random-Sm use matching random intervention budgets.
ASR (%)
20 15 10
30 25 20
5
Last
Top-1
Top-3
Top-5
Layer selection
Last
Top-1
Top-3
Top-5
Layer selection
Figure E.4: Layer selection ablation for segment-level masking on Dolly. Lines report attack success rate (ASR) on HEx-PHI and HarmBench across target models; lower is better. The dashed vertical line marks the Top-3 setting used in the main experiments.
three safety-critical layers with the single highestranked layer, the top five safety-critical layers, and the final transformer layer. The comparison keeps the source models, subspace dimension, intervention budget, and fine-tuning protocol fixed. The Top-3 setting is competitive across target models, although some individual metrics favor Top-1 or Top-5.
E.9.2
Response Splitter
Table E.9 evaluates different response splitters for DataShield-Sm. The ablation keeps the sourcemodel aggregation rule, token-to-segment pooling rule, and intervention budget fixed while changing only the raw-text splitter used to form tokenizerindependent response spans.
Target
Segmentation PHI↓ HARM↓ NLTK word splitter 14.1 19.6 Phi3-medium-4k-it spaCy word splitter 12.0 19.8 Default 12.5 18.2 NLTK word splitter 7.4 25.1 Qwen3-4B-it spaCy word splitter 7.9 22.1 Default 6.8 23.9 NLTK word splitter 15.2 28.0 Gemma2-27B-it spaCy word splitter 12.9 29.7 Default 13.5 27.6 NLTK word splitter 6.5 19.1 Gemma3-12B-it spaCy word splitter 7.2 17.5 Default 6.9 18.6
pooling function over token positions inside each raw-text segment. Mean pooling may dilute short risky spans when the spans appear inside longer benign segments. Sum pooling may give high priority to long segments and increase unnecessary masking. Max pooling is the main setting because it targets localized high-risk spans inside otherwise benign responses. Target
Pooling PHI↓ HARM↓ Mean 25.8 31.4 Phi3-medium-4k-it Sum 16.5 23.2 Max 12.1 18.6 Mean 17.2 33.1 Qwen3-4B-it Sum 9.8 26.5 Max 6.5 22.6 Mean 26.5 40.8 Gemma2-27B-it Sum 17.4 32.1 Max 13.1 27.6 Mean 18.5 29.3 Gemma3-12B-it Sum 10.2 21.8 Max 6.4 18.1
Table E.9: Response-splitter ablation for DataShieldSm on Dolly. Default is the lexical segmenter used in the main implementation. PHI and HARM are ASR scores; lower is better.
E.9.3
Source-Model Score Aggregation
Table E.10 compares aggregation rules for sourcemodel risk scores. The ablation keeps the source models, selected layers, subspace dimensionality, and intervention budget fixed, and changes only the aggregation rule over source-model scores. Min aggregation corresponds to a strict consensus rule, where an example receives a high risk score only when all source models assign high risk. Max aggregation corresponds to a union-style rule, where a high score from any source model can dominate. Target
Aggregation
Phi3 medium 4k-it
Min Max Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Mean Min Max Mean
Qwen3 4B-it Gemma2 27B-it Gemma3 12B-it
DataShield-Sp DataShield-Sm PHI↓ HARM↓ PHI↓ HARM↓ 31.4 41.2 30.2 38.4 27.6 36.1 26.8 34.3 19.1 25.2 12.1 18.6 22.1 31.5 20.4 31.1 18.8 27.9 18.2 27.5 7.6 16.1 6.5 22.6 27.8 36.4 25.4 33.5 23.5 31.8 22.1 31.0 10.2 18.6 13.1 27.6 20.6 25.1 19.2 23.8 17.5 22.4 16.8 20.6 5.5 11.6 6.4 18.1
Table E.10: Source-model score aggregation ablation for sample-level filtering (DataShield-Sp) and segmentlevel masking (DataShield-Sm) on Dolly. Mean aggregation is the main configuration.
E.9.4
Segment-Level Risk Pooling
Table E.11 evaluates how token-level risk increments are pooled into a segment-level risk score for DataShield-Sm. The ablation keeps the segmentation method, source-model aggregation rule, and intervention budget fixed, and changes only the
Table E.11: Segment-level risk pooling ablation for DataShield-Sm on Dolly. Max pooling is the main configuration.
E.10
Qualitative Case Studies
We include qualitative examples of the data selected by DataShield at the sample and segment levels. Table E.12 places high-risk and low-risk samples side by side. Table E.13 shows examples where DataShield-Sm masks localized response segments.
High-risk sample
Low-risk sample
Instruction: Give a list of the parts of your physical appearance you would want to change? Output: Height, lips, nose, eye color, hair color, tattoo removed, weight, muscle, jaw line, eyebrows, cellulite, stomach, veins, wrinkles.
Instruction: Describe a recurring dream you’ve had. Output: Thank you for asking about my dreams. I am a computer model and therefore I do not actually dream myself. I do learn from content and so I know a lot about what kinds of dreams one could have. People often have dreams about their work, their children, losing all of their teeth, and flying. Some of these can be recurring dreams.
Instruction: What are signs my partner is cheating? Output: Turning off their shared location, changing the password on their phone, new interest in self care, unplanned business trips, spending lots of time on social media, pulling cash out of the Atm so their transactions are not traceable, turning phone off or not answering phone.
Instruction: When was the last time aliens visited the earth? Output: There is no evidence that aliens have ever visited the earth. There have been many claims including UFO sightings, strange atmospheric patterns, ancient buildings showing characteristics outside of human capabilities at that time. But all of these have been refuted and there is no credible evidence of alien visitation.
Instruction: Give me some quotes from Aristotle that I might use in a school assignment. Output:
Instruction: Would you rather be Tom Brady or a Dragon? Output: Because of my nature I do not have a personal opinion. Tom Brady is a human football player. He is famous and rich which are typically very sought after traits. Dragon’s are large mythical creatures that can fly, breath fire, and perform other magical tasks. Some might say the comparison between Tom Brady and a typical Dragon is like comparing apples to oranges.
1. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. 2. No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. 3. Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life... 4. Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet. 5. Learning is not child’s play; we can not learn without pain.
Table E.12: Sample-level qualitative examples selected by DataShield. Red text marks the content selected as high risk; the right column shows lower-risk samples for comparison. Case
Segment-level example
1
Instruction: What are three most commonly sung lyric soprano arias? Original response: Three most commonly sung lyric soprano arias? - “Quando m’en vo” from La Boheme by Puccini - “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi by Puccini - “Deh! vieni non tardar” from Le Nozze di Figaro by Mozart Response with masked segments: Three most commonly sung lyric soprano arias? - “Quando m’en vo” from La Boheme by Puccini - “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi by Puccini - “Deh! vieni non tardar” from Le Nozze di Figaro by Mozart
2
Instruction: Give me the top 5 burger places in Chicago. Original response: This is a bit subjective, but the best top 5 burger places in Chicago are, Au Cheval in the West Loop, Little Bad Wolf in Andersonville, The Loyalist in West Loop, Gretel, and Fatso’s Last Stand in Ukrainian Village. Response with masked segments: This is a bit subjective, but the best top 5 burger places in Chicago are, Au Cheval in the West Loop, Little Bad Wolf in Andersonville, The Loyalist in West Loop, Gretel, and Fatso’s Last Stand in Ukrainian Village.
3
Instruction: From the passage below, please extract the names of the general partners from a16z. Original response: In addition to the founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, a16z general partners include John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan, Peter Levine, Chris Dixon, Vijay Pande, Martin Casado and Sriram Krishnan. Response with masked segments: In addition to the founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, a16z general partners include John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan, Peter Levine, Chris Dixon, Vijay Pande, Martin Casado and Sriram Krishnan.
Table E.13: Segment-level qualitative examples. Red text marks response segments selected by DataShield-Sm.