用简单强化学习让大模型主动讲清拒绝理由,既安全又不瞎拒绝。
AlphaAlign: Incentivizing Safety Alignment with Extremely Simplified Reinforcement Learning
- 纯强化学习框架,仅需正负标签和少量训练步数。
- 拒绝有害请求更准,过度拒绝减少,任务表现反而更好。
- 鼓励模型自己说理由,避免机械式拒绝,适合高安全场景。
大型语言模型虽在预训练中积累了潜在的安全理解,但仍易生成有害内容,并在安全对齐后出现过度拒绝和效用下降问题。现有方法常导致表面化的拒绝模式,或依赖大量监督数据进行基于推理的对齐,未能充分挖掘模型内在的安全自知能力。我们提出AlphaAlign,一种简洁高效的纯强化学习框架,通过可验证的安全奖励激励模型主动进行安全推理。该框架采用双奖励机制:可验证的安全奖励鼓励对有害请求做出格式正确且有明确理由的拒绝,同时惩罚过度拒绝;归一化的帮助性奖励则引导对正常输入生成高质量回复。这使模型能在不依赖安全特定监督数据的情况下,发展出主动安全推理能力。实验表明,AlphaAlign具备三大优势:(1)简单高效,仅需二元提示安全标签和极少强化学习步骤即可实现显著提升;(2)打破安全-效用权衡,既增强对有害内容的拒绝能力,又减少过度拒绝,同时保持甚至提升通用任务性能与对未知越狱攻击的鲁棒性;(3)深层对齐,促使模型生成显式的安全推理依据,而非依赖浅层拒绝模式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety alignment. Current safety alignment methods often result in superficial refusal shortcuts or rely on intensive supervision for reasoning-based approaches, failing to fully leverage the model's intrinsic safety self-awareness. We propose \textbf{AlphaAlign}, a simple yet effective pure reinforcement learning (RL) framework with verifiable safety reward designed to incentivize this latent safety awareness through proactive safety reasoning.} AlphaAlign employs a dual-reward system: a verifiable safety reward encourages correctly formatted and explicitly justified refusals for harmful queries while penalizing over-refusals, and a normalized helpfulness reward guides high-quality responses to benign inputs. This allows the model to develop proactive safety reasoning capabilities without depending on supervised safety-specific reasoning data. AlphaAlign demonstrates three key advantages: (1) Simplicity and efficiency, requiring only binary prompt safety labels and minimal RL steps for substantial improvements. (2) Breaking the safety-utility trade-off, by enhancing refusal of harmful content and reducing over-refusals, while simultaneously maintaining or even improving general task performance and robustness to unseen jailbreaks. (3) Deep alignment, fostering proactive safety reasoning that generates explicit safety rationales rather than relying on shallow refusal patterns.
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