Multitask Mayhem: Unveiling and Mitigating Safety Gaps in LLMs Fine-tuning

TL;DR

This paper investigates how fine-tuning LLMs on various tasks can weaken safety measures, revealing task-specific vulnerabilities and proposing a new multitask safety dataset to improve robustness.

Contribution

It uncovers safety degradation patterns across tasks and introduces a multitask safety dataset to enhance safety robustness in LLMs.

Findings

Fine-tuning for code generation and translation causes the most safety degradation.

LLMs show weaker safety guardrails for translation and classification tasks.

Existing safety solutions lack robustness across different tasks.

Abstract

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their adoption across a wide range of tasks, ranging from code generation to machine translation and sentiment analysis, etc. Red teaming/Safety alignment efforts show that fine-tuning models on benign (non-harmful) data could compromise safety. However, it remains unclear to what extent this phenomenon is influenced by different variables, including fine-tuning task, model calibrations, etc. This paper explores the task-wise safety degradation due to fine-tuning on downstream tasks such as summarization, code generation, translation, and classification across various calibration. Our results reveal that: 1) Fine-tuning LLMs for code generation and translation leads to the highest degradation in safety guardrails. 2) LLMs generally have weaker guardrails for translation and classification, with 73-92% of harmful prompts answered, across baseline and other calibrations, falling into one of two concern categories. 3) Current solutions, including guards and safety tuning datasets, lack cross-task robustness. To address these issues, we developed a new multitask safety dataset effectively reducing attack success rates across a range of tasks without compromising the model's overall helpfulness. Our work underscores the need for generalized alignment measures to ensure safer and more robust models.