Closing the Distribution Gap in Adversarial Training for LLMs
Firstname1 Lastname1, Firstname2 Lastname2, Firstname3 Lastname3 et al. · University of YYY · Company Name +1 more
Firstname1 Lastname1, Firstname2 Lastname2, Firstname3 Lastname3 et al. · University of YYY · Company Name +1 more
Proposes Distributional Adversarial Training using Diffusion LLMs to close coverage gaps and harden LLMs against natural-language jailbreaks
Adversarial training for LLMs is one of the most promising methods to reliably improve robustness against adversaries. However, despite significant progress, models remain vulnerable to simple in-distribution exploits, such as rewriting prompts in the past tense or translating them into other languages. We argue that this persistent fragility stems from a fundamental limitation in current adversarial training algorithms: they minimize adversarial loss on their training set but inadequately cover the data distribution, resulting in vulnerability to seemingly simple attacks. To bridge this gap, we propose Distributional Adversarial Training, DAT. We leverage Diffusion LLMs to approximate the true joint distribution of prompts and responses, enabling generation of diverse, high-likelihood samples that address generalization failures. By combining optimization over the data distribution provided by the diffusion model with continuous adversarial training, DAT achieves substantially higher adversarial robustness than previous methods.
Firstname1 Lastname1, Firstname2 Lastname2, Firstname3 Lastname3 et al. · University of YYY · Company Name +1 more
Expert-level safety alignment for MoE LLMs that surgically repairs jailbreak-activated experts to defeat routing-based bypasses
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models introduce unique challenges for safety alignment due to their sparse routing mechanisms, which can enable degenerate optimization behaviors under standard full-parameter fine-tuning. In our preliminary experiments, we observe that naively applying full-parameter safety fine-tuning to MoE models can reduce attack success rates through routing or expert dominance effects, rather than by directly repairing Safety-Critical Experts. To address this challenge, we propose RASA, a routing-aware expert-level alignment framework that explicitly repairs Safety-Critical Experts while preventing routing-based bypasses. RASA identifies experts disproportionately activated by successful jailbreaks, selectively fine-tunes only these experts under fixed routing, and subsequently enforces routing consistency with safety-aligned contexts. Across two representative MoE architectures and a diverse set of jailbreak attacks, RASA achieves near-perfect robustness, strong cross-attack generalization, and substantially reduced over-refusal, while preserving general capabilities on benchmarks such as MMLU, GSM8K, and TruthfulQA. Our results suggest that robust MoE safety alignment benefits from targeted expert repair rather than global parameter updates, offering a practical and architecture-preserving alternative to prior approaches.