Pith. sign in

REVIEW 16 cited by

Tamper-Resistant Safeguards for Open-Weight LLMs

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2408.00761 v4 pith:ASSWOMG3 submitted 2024-08-01 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

Tamper-Resistant Safeguards for Open-Weight LLMs

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL
keywords llmsopen-weightsafeguardscapabilitiesfine-tuningmethodstepstamper-resistance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Rapid advances in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have raised widespread concerns regarding their potential for malicious use. Open-weight LLMs present unique challenges, as existing safeguards lack robustness to tampering attacks that modify model weights. For example, recent works have demonstrated that refusal and unlearning safeguards can be trivially removed with a few steps of fine-tuning. These vulnerabilities necessitate new approaches for enabling the safe release of open-weight LLMs. We develop a method, called TAR, for building tamper-resistant safeguards into open-weight LLMs such that adversaries cannot remove the safeguards even after hundreds of steps of fine-tuning. In extensive evaluations and red teaming analyses, we find that our method greatly improves tamper-resistance while preserving benign capabilities. Our results demonstrate that progress on tamper-resistance is possible, opening up a promising new avenue to improve the safety and security of open-weight LLMs.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 16 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. CacheTrap: Unveiling a Stealthier Gray-Box Trojan against LLMs

    cs.CR 2025-11 conditional novelty 8.0

    CacheTrap achieves 100% targeted attack success on five open-source LLMs by using an efficient search to locate and flip a single bit in the KV cache as a transient trigger, while preserving normal accuracy without th...

  2. Emergent Misalignment Recruits a Pre-existing Persona Subspace

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Fine-tuning on narrow bad data recruits a low-rank persona subspace already present in a frozen instruction-tuned model; holding that subspace out of activations prevents broad misalignment, and injecting it into the ...

  3. FlipGuard: Defending Large Language Models Against Quantization-Conditioned Backdoor Attacks

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    FlipGuard perturbs LLM weights prior to quantization to neutralize quantization-conditioned backdoor attacks, evaluated via the Defense Effectiveness Ratio on multiple models and quantization schemes.

  4. One Step to the Side: Why Defenses Against Malicious Finetuning Fail Under Adaptive Adversaries

    cs.CR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    A unified adaptive attack exploits the common weakness across 15 defenses against malicious fine-tuning, showing they only obscure rather than remove harmful model capabilities.

  5. Breaking the Rounding Trap: Securing LLMs against Quantization-Conditioned Backdoors

    cs.CR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    QuantGuard is a pre-quantization method using differentiable rounding controls, error-guided reversal constraints, output consistency, and weight regularization on a small calibration set to suppress quantization-cond...

  6. Breaking the Rounding Trap: Securing LLMs against Quantization-Conditioned Backdoors

    cs.CR 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    QuantGuard uses differentiable rounding control to break quantization-boundary backdoors in LLMs, reducing post-quantization attack success to clean-model levels across six models and INT8/FP4/NF4.

  7. RepSelect: Robust LLM Unlearning via Representation Selectivity

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RepSelect isolates forget-set-specific representations via gradient PCA collapse to achieve 4-50x better post-relearning robustness than baselines across multiple models and forget categories.

  8. Robust LLM Unlearning Against Relearning Attacks: The Minor Components in Representations Matter

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Targeting minor components in LLM representations during unlearning yields substantially better resistance to relearning attacks than prior methods.

  9. Safety Drift After Fine-Tuning: Evidence from High-Stakes Domains

    cs.CY 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Benign fine-tuning of foundation models induces large, heterogeneous, and often contradictory changes in safety metrics across general and domain-specific benchmarks.

  10. Robust Policy Optimization to Prevent Catastrophic Forgetting

    cs.LG 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FRPO applies a max-min robust optimization over KL-bounded policy neighborhoods during RLHF to reduce catastrophic forgetting of safety and accuracy under subsequent SFT or RL fine-tuning.

  11. RippleBench: Capturing Ripple Effects Using Existing Knowledge Repositories

    cs.AI 2025-12 conditional novelty 6.0

    RippleBench automatically generates questions at increasing semantic distance from unlearned topics and shows all eight tested unlearning methods degrade accuracy that recovers only slowly with distance.

  12. Downgrade to Upgrade: Optimizer Simplification Enhances Robustness in LLM Unlearning

    cs.LG 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0

    Downgrading optimizers to lower-information variants during LLM unlearning yields more robust forgetting on MUSE and WMDP benchmarks by converging to harder-to-perturb loss basins.

  13. Secure LLM Fine-Tuning via Safety-Aware Probing

    cs.LG 2025-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SAP locates safety-correlated directions via contrastive signals and perturbs hidden-state propagation with a lightweight probe to preserve safety while fine-tuning LLMs for task performance.

  14. Engineering Trustworthy Agentic AI for Critical Systems

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    A survey claiming that agentic AI trustworthiness is a single cross-domain problem and outlining a framework for graded, certifiable assurance.

  15. LLM Unlearning for Cyber Defense: A Survey on Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Threats

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 4.0

    Most gradient-based LLM unlearning methods achieve behavioral suppression, not true forgetting, and current benchmarks cannot certify that knowledge has been removed.

  16. Harmful Fine-tuning Attacks and Defenses for Large Language Models: A Survey

    cs.CR 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    Survey of harmful fine-tuning attacks on LLMs, their variants, defense strategies, mechanical analysis, and evaluation methodologies.