Towards Comprehensive Post Safety Alignment of Large Language Models via Safety Patching

Abstract

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) has been gaining increasing attention. However, current safety-aligned LLMs suffer from the fragile and imbalanced safety mechanisms, which can still be induced to generate unsafe responses, exhibit over-safety by rejecting safe user inputs, and fail to preserve general utility after safety alignment. To this end, we propose a novel post safety alignment (PSA) method to address these inherent and emerging safety challenges, including safety enhancement, over-safety mitigation, and utility preservation. In specific, we introduce \textsc{SafePatching}, a novel framework for comprehensive PSA, where two distinct safety patches are developed on the harmful data to enhance safety and mitigate over-safety concerns, and then seamlessly integrated into the target LLM backbone without compromising its utility. Extensive experiments on four representative aligned LLMs, including LLaMA-2/3, Gemma and Mistral, show that \textsc{SafePatching} achieves a more comprehensive PSA than baseline methods, further optimizing the balance between being helpful and harmless in current aligned LLMs. Also, \textsc{SafePatching} demonstrates its superiority in continual PSA scenarios.